Trenitalia
 

Hi,

I'm trying to book a few tickets on Trenitalia for our travel September. We tried to purchase supereconomy tickets from Milano -> Verona departing at 8:05 AM on an FB train. After going through the motions and selecting "non-registered user" it wouldn't allow us to buy the tickets. After some frustration with registering, etc. and getting a personal code I finally tried to access the supereconomy tickets from Milano -> Verona at 8:05 only to find out that the option has been "sold out" when before every single seat was still available on that train on Coach 6. This is literally minutes apart. What is going on? It seems now our options are leaving at 7:35 or later in the afternoon or paying 20€. Both of us tried to book these tickets and have the same result. Can anyone give me an idea of how quickly supereconomy tickets get sold out, etc? Because this just seems odd.

So minutes later we had some problems booking the 7:35 train so I went back to re-enter info and the 8:05 train appeared for 18€ total for supereconomy rather than the 38€ total.

There are a very limited number of the super economy tickets available and I think what happens is that Trenitalia blocks the seats you are trying to book for a certain length of time, maybe 10 mins or so, so when you go back to try again it says they are no longer available. This happened to me whenI went to book super economy tickets earlier this year, I panicked and booked the economy tickets. A while later I went back in and saw the super economy ones were back.......very frustrating.

Try looking at the same trains using italiarail.com

Thanks Dukey! I know you can get refunded for the booking fee from ItaliaRail but we wanted to just keep things simpler and book directly from TrenItalia.

IA lizzy, we figured there was some algorithm that makes them temporarily unavailable. We managed to get the 8:05 tickets for the supereconomy prize, but now we are dealing with the same issue for the Venice to Florence booking. We'll try again tomorrow or depart earlier.

So you found super-economy fares, tried to book them, aborted the booking, then minutes later found they'd sold out?

D'oh! Your own abortive booking 'held' these last few tickets, so minutes later you couldn't see any left. But if you'd waited 15 minutes, those tickets would have been released back into the system when the 'hold' on them expired. Many airline and rail booking systems work in this sort of way. ;0)

Oh, yeah, I waited and managed to get the tickets for Milan to Verona, but no luck with two other routes I originally saw but disappeared within seconds. I guess I figured a set amount of tickets are sold at the super economy price or it's sold based on how far in advance you book. When we got to the seat selection process about 0-2 seats were unavailable. So I guess it's just weird that those type of tickets are completely sold out?

I panicked and booked tickets for 2-3 hours earlier than we wanted to depart Venice. Hope we don't feel too rushed on our last day in Venice. Now all of the prices seem to be Economy only with some Supereconomy left for 1st class. wow limited tickets definitely...