Last week I booked and bought four tickets online with Trenitalia. Three of the tickets were for internal trips and the other was from Milan to Zurich. I am quite sure that I booked all four the same way.
When I received the email confirmations, the first three had attachments which were the tickets to print out and the email for Zurich was just an email only.
All emails looked the same and all had PNR numbers so I thought I would be OK for the Zurich trip by just taking the email and showing it to the conductor. It wasn’t till I was looking closer at the Zurich email that I noticed that it differed slightly in that the ‘Pick up procedure’ was Self Service, the other three were Electronic Ticket.
Also at the bottom of the Zurich email in small lighter print was the following note: “Attention: for tickets with delivery Self Service before you get on board you need to print your ticket from a machine Self Service Station. To collect, you must type the name entry screen and the PNR listed in this email”, followed by a link to the stations with self service machines.
On the Rail Europe site it says that these tickets also need to be validated before getting on board but there’s no mention of this on the Trenitalia site.
Maybe this happened because it’s a trip to another country, with Swiss train staff! Does anyone know if the email and PNR would have satisfied the conductor or would they have insisted on a real ticket?