train reservations

no... always just book on the direct site, no need for a middle man.

seat61.com outlines the sites for each country.

Kim

Try www.trainline.eu/?

Could it be you need to clear the foreign transaction with your credit card beforehand? That has been an issue for me in the past. I have looked at rome2rio for basic information, but have never booked with them. Good luck.

Question: was the rejected credit card one with no foreign fees? Someone reported here recently that the Bahn wouldn't accept their credit card. Turns out the card was ones with no foreign fees. When they tried a card with fees, it was accepted.

Unfortunately I think all my cards are no transaction fees.....tried 3 and none work.....but thanks for the info...

I used loco2.com this week to book seats from Madrid to Seville for late March - the Renfe site is know to be very confusing, and Rick, Seat61, and the Forum participants all recommended trying Loco2. There is a small fee, but it was easy as can be; my credit card was accepted without a hitch. I plan to use the site to reserve the other legs of our trip as soon as the dates are available.

Lee, hate to disagree with you but the idea of accepting a fee card over a non-free doesn't make any sense. It would not make any difference to train company because they are not getting any of the fee. ALL FEEs for credit card usage is applied by the car issuer.

Because, the so-called "no transaction fee" credit cards sometimes claw back the money by charging the vendor extra %. And the vendors then say no, we will only pay the standard fee to the credit card issuer / bank. Result: impasse, they refuse to pay extra and reject the card.

Voyages SNCF has not taken many US credit cards for years, so you must have got lucky last year. For the Prems category of fare, they will accept payment by PayPal. If that fare category is not available, then any other type of fare is normally easy to book through either Rail Europe or trainline.com with your credit card.

the idea of accepting a fee card over a non-free doesn't make any
sense.

Maybe not to you, but apparently it makes sense to the credit card companies.

In the past, credit card companies have made a lot of money from something called a transfer fee. If you charged a purchase of, say, 100 euro, on your card, the bank only paid the merchant 96 euro (4% discount) while still charging your account 100 euro converted to dollars. So the banks were happy to waive the 3% international transaction fee in order to get the 4% transfer fee. New EU law limits the transfer fee to 0.3% for credit cards. I'm told this transfer fee limit only applies to transactions within the EU, but apparently some businesses are refusing across the board to pay a higher transfer fee. So, when the Bahn, or SNCF, refuses to pay your bank the 4% transfer fee, your bank can't make enough money on only 0.3%, so they refuse the transaction.

I don't know if this is what is happening, but someone earlier reported that when they finally used a card with a foreign fee, the transaction went through.

MrsEB, the merchants' equipment does not know what the card-holder's bank will charge the card-holder in fees.
But, the merchant's bank/card service provider (which is authorising the transaction) does know that the card issuer is only authorising payment of 96% of the bill (4% discount), which is way over the standard 0.3%. The system is configured not to accept so low a payment, and refuses the transaction.

That still doesn't answer how merchants' equipment will decipher which
of the dozens and dozens of Bank of American Visa cards, for example,
have transaction fees and which don't.

A credit card has 16 digits, enough for everyone in the world to have over one million cards, each with a unique number. So what are all those digits for? Don't you think there might be some information encoded in the number on the card, like how much discount the merchant has to take if they accept the card? Or the country of origin for the card.

The European Union recently capped the Interchange Fee, the discount a merchant takes on payment from the card issuing bank at 0.3% for credit cards and 0.2% for debit cards. This applies to cards issued by banks in the EU for transactions in the EU. It does not currently apply to US issued cards used in Europe, but it appears that at least some big businesses, such as the Bahn, could now be refusing to pay an interchange fee over the limit.

Can it be that a bank which takes 3% from you for foreign transactions is willing to take the lower interchange fee from the merchant, while a bank which charges no foreign transaction fees is not.

According to Voyages- sncf it has to do with your card having 3Ds or not. Their site will only take cards that have it.

3Ds as in Verified by Visa, etc. That still doesn't necessarily explain why someone on this site had two fee-free cards declined but was successful when they use a card that charges the user a fee. But then, that was just one case; we need to start tracking this problem.

im,

I'd suggest using the trainline.eu website suggested in earlier replies. They sell tickets for trains in several countries in Europe (France, Germany, Italy, etc.) at the same prices as charged by the rail networks. Registration on the site is required, but it's all very user friendly.