Has anyone successfully bought a ticket for ES train travel with a credit card online? I have registered and yet it keeps declining all my cards even though I've entered correctly. Maybe you can't buy from US?

Yes, you can buy it from the US. Many US credit cards block a charge like this because it's a foreign country and they consider it a questionable charge. Call your credit card company and tell them you will be putting through a charge from trenitalia.

I had the same thing happen multiple times so I gave up and booked via ItaliaRail---I think that is the name---which is a North America Trenitalia agent. It cost $15 to have DHL ship the tickets and was well worth it to me!

I had lots of trouble with trenitalia - part of the problem was that I was using an AOL address and apparently AOL will not allow a password to be confirmed by trenitalia. I switched to a yahoo address and was able to get a password, but then trenitalia would never accept my credit card payment.

Eventually I used SNCF (we are traveling from Venice to Paris) and although my first credit card was declined (*see below), I used another and bought the tickets online. With SNCF, however, you cannot print them out or have them mailed to the USA - we had to have them mailed to a "local" address - fortunately we have friends in Venice, and the tickets arrived about five days later.

* We had wanted to use our Capital One m/c to avoid the 3% foreign transaction fees, but it was declined. There was a "fraud" alert because it was being used outside normal areas ... we could have called them to alert them to the purchase, but at the time it was just easier to continue with the transaction using another card. Capital One contacted me by phone the next day to tell me an attempt to use our card had occurred.

I have a Citibank MC and using the # printed on the card I was unable, as you are, to purchase tickets on Trenitalia.

When I used the "virtual" card numbers offered by Citibank (part of their identity theft program), I had no problem at all.

My guess is that Citibank would not authorize the purchase my normal cc #, to protect from fraud. Since there was no way anyone else could have the virtual card # they let it go through (since there was no way anyone else could have that # since it was a new # generated on the spot while I was logged into my account, and it was only valid for a single merchant).

You may check with your cc co to see if they have a similar feature available.