Train travel from Marseille to Arles

The ticket machines will accept euro coins. You will be on a regional train. No reservations are possible on regional trains and there is no discount for booking in advance. If all seats are taken (highly unlikely), you can stand.

We used our non-chip cards, staying in Lyon 6 weeks last summer, and six weeks the summer before. The cards were accepted in every transaction, including train station ticket machines, airports, renting cars, the works. We also stayed for 5 weeks (each time) in Germany and Switzerland, same results. The only place they were never accepted was for the rental bikes in France. Don't know where you heard the chip thing, but I've never actually encountered it in 8-9 weeks of European travel each year for the past 10 years..

Regarding the prior comment: I've never seen a train ticket machine in France (nor an unattended gas station pump) that will take a non-chip card, at least for the last 5 years or more. A couple of times in the past I'd try my cards to get train tickets or gas and couldn't figure out why none of them worked. Then I found out a year or so ago, and got a chip and PIN card for our recent trip to France. True, non-chip will work in pretty much all attended situations, but not at machines.

To Dennis: Chip-only cards for trains departing Marseille airport. I learned this the hard way, forced to travel into the centre of the city to buy a train ticket from a real live agent. I've also seen SNCF ticket machines in Paris train stations which had no slot for card-swiping, just PIN chip cards.

To Southham: Do you remember if the machines accept Euro coins as someone pointed out above?

I have no idea where the magical machines Dennis used are, but as someone who LIVES in Germany, I can say that chip & pin only are accepted at ticket machines in Germany. Ditto for France. You can get around in France pretty well without a chip card but ticket machines and unmanned gas stations and toll boths are the real problems. In Germany you're way more screwed, you can usually ONLY use a magnetic stripe card at better restaurants and higher-end stores. Sheilah I want to say that the ticket machines in France accept coins, I'm 99% sure, but don't quote me on it or count on it. Have some cash on you, and you'll be fine, though.

Sorry I don't remember about the choice of stuffing cash into a machine. It's three years ago and things might have changed. However, I know I had more than enough euros for the fare since I had to pay for an expensive taxi into Marseille.

On ticket machines in Germany accepting only chip and pin credit cards: This must be a very recent development. Does include DB machines at train stations? I have only found this to be true in France with SNCF machines.

Also, I believe Chip and PIN cards only at Paris Metro/RER machines. I think they also all take coins, but probably not bills. I didn't pay too much attention, since I had a chip and PIN card.

Last summer (July) I took a day trip r/t from Hamburg to Kiel, instead of using my Pass, bought the tickets at Hamburg Hbf. from the DB ticket machine. I paid for them using a creidit card (magnetic stripe)....it went through, no problems. You know you used a credit card to pay instead of cash because at the bottom right hand corner, the card used, Visa or Mastercard, is indicated. If I were to do exactly this at Paris Nord buying a r/t ticket to, say, Soissons at the SNCF machine using my magnetic stripe card, it would not go through...says so on the ticket machine. Maybe in Germany paying with a US credit card at a DB ticket machine has changed....since last summer.