Using your passport / confirmation email as your ticket on a train from Barcelona to Lyon?

score:4

Accepted answer

I think you can still negotiate that with the agent, saying also that you can some later to the train office to show the ticket (I guess the ticket could only be used on this specific train). But I don't guarantee anything, I usually avoid to ride a train ticket-less.

But honestly what I would do is use the regular train offices/websites to book trains, like www.voyages-sncf.com or the Spanish equivalent. They usually offer to collect it in a station if you have a chip card, you can print them, you can pre-book them and then buy in the station if you don't have a card, ...

So, where are you now? if you are in Spain, did you try to go to any station and use a ticket machine or ask someone to buy a ticket? if it's the same price/conditions, just buy it there and try to get a refund for the other.

If it's too complicated because there is a border, maybe you can try to buy a ticket to perpignan or wherever the train stops first in France, and book another ticket from there, that you collect when you are there.

Anyway, to summarize the answer, there are a lot of tricks to be aware to travel by train in Europe. But yeah, I consider not a good idea to try to board with a fake ticket. What I would do is figure what are the refund/change fare conditions, and see if I can get an actual ticket.

EDIT : I just tried to book this trip on voyages-sncf.com. So there is a 15% refund/exchange fee on tickets on Spanish trains, and it's free for the French part (using the standard fare). They offer to send it by mail, to print it at home and to collect it in a train office (with a 10 euros fee if done abroad). So first, don't book on tgv-europe, I believe it's a crappy website.

Upvote:1

The answer to this is that you definitely need to either have the posted tickets, or get a refund and then buy new tickets that you can either print-at-home or collect at the train station. You will not be allowed to travel with the email confirmation + identification, unless the train conductor on that train breaks the rules for you, but this is unlikely.

It is not is possible to buy print-at-home or collect-at-station tickets for this journey from a French SNCF website (TGV-Europe.com is owned by SNCF along with a load of other sites, including all Rail Europe sites and voyages-sncf.com). You can purchase print-at-home or collect-at-station tickets for any domestic French journey but as this is a cross-border journey (i.e. it starts in Spain) it is only possible to buy posted tickets. I know this because my website loco2.com is currently integrated with the French booking system and we offer the same delivery options.

I think the Spanish rail company Renfe does sell print-at-home tickets for this journey, but you may have problems using a foreign credit card (see this post).

I hope that helps anyone reading this who is in a similar situation to the original poster.

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