TGV and senior discount cards

Hi Barry, I’ll be interested in what others have to say. I bought a SNCF Carte Avantage Senior card for the first time this year. I have booked a few future tickets with it and it clearly shows my “discount linked to my card.” Last year I didn’t have it and remember my experience being similar to yours when booking, however I had a senior Eurailpass. I have taken one train with my new digital (only) senior card about a week ago and was prepared to show it with my passport. My ticket wasn’t checked, nor was I.

I’ve bought the senior discount pass the last couple of trips. If you don’t buy the pass you don’t get the discount. It’s not automatic because of your age. Only you can decide if the cost of the pass will save you any money based on how often you will use the train.

I had tried calling the TGV help line from the SCNF site. The site said there were only French-speaking operators. While I had lived in France for 2 years in the early 1980's working in a cooking school in Paris where I had to translate the French chefs' lessons into English, my French-speaking ability has withered with disuse. I did call but the gist of what I got from the operator was that there was no way to later buy a senior discount pass and apply it to tickets already purchased, no matter that the mistake was honest and I felt terrible about it.

My husband then did a search to see if there were a way to speak in English to a TGV operator and lo and behold, one of the search results was a Rick Steve's Travel Forum entry.
For any questions with TGV, you can call from the US 011-33-1-84-94-36-35, 8 am to 8 pm local time (I don't know about Sunday). When they answer, it will be a recorded voice saying if you want an English operator, press #85. Then you get out in the queue for an English speaking operator. The person from the previous forum chat suggested that the best time was to call mid day. I called a little after midnight, 8 am their time and I waited on hold for about 10 minutes.
In my case, I got a very kind man who said, no problem, we'll get this figured out. His English was very good. Turns out I had merely purchased a very low cost, advance purchase ticket that was not refundable, the lowest cost class of ticket.

He said it was standard for the confirmation email to have the wording to bring your senior discount card with you to the station, regardless of whether your ticket was purchased with that discount or not. And he said that if you were buying a ticket with a senior discount pass, you would have to enter the pass' number before the purchase was complete so that the ticket would be linked to the pass.

I wish this information was on the TGV website and on Rick Steves' train section. Hope this helps others

Many thanks for the English-speaking phone information. I may need to call them as my questions aren't easily answered by looking at the SNCF Connect website.
I'm interested in buying a senior TGV ticket from Paris to Marseille or -- if available -- Paris to Aix en Provence. The site shows Aix as an option, but when I tried to book, it was only available with an apparently very long layover so that the journey would take more than 7 hours. If that's the only way to get to Aix, then Marseilles at approx. 3 1/2 hours would be better.
I'm also slightly confused about the price of the SNCF Max Senior pass versus the TGV price. It looks like you get the TGV for free (zero Euros) if you have the pass, but perhaps that's only available on certain TGV routes, dates and times?
Further, another website indicates that Trenitalia also serves the route Paris-Marseille. I'd have to look at the Trenitalia website to see how this compares in price and schedule availability.