CRAZY4TRAVEL

I had seen many messages from people having difficulty purchasing rail tickets online through the Trenitalia site. I managed to book my eticket for travel in May and would not do it again.

We had to change our train routing and date while over there so I enquired with the customer service agent in Foligno. He seemed to think it would be no problem so I went to the ticket counter.

I wrote in Italian what I wanted to do and the agent pointed me in the direction of the automated ticket machine. I was not able to retreive my reservation and after several attempts the ticket agent came over. She was not able to get it to work and stomped off.

She came back with some paper tickets with my original reservation. I went back to her counter and asked again to make a change. She repeated twice "INTERNET..NO CHANGE!! INTERNET..NO CHANGE!!".

I sulked back to the nice man in customer service to tell him that I could not make the change. He took me back to the counter and asked which lady. A heated discussion ensued and he still could not get the nasty lady to change her mind. He then approached her coworker and was able to get her to make the change. I was changing from an ES train to an IC train and the gentleman was even so kind as to suggest that for an extra 1.80 Euro, I could upgrade to first class which would be better for that type of train.

Next time I will wait until I get to Europe to buy my ticket. I think etickets are just starting to catch on for the train and have not quite been perfected yet.

Bill_I

Even though this wasn't Trenitalia, and a majority of train schedules are reliable, just a warning. Whether you purchase ahead or the same day, & a specific train is your target, you may want to check ahead of time to see if the schedule has changed. We were headed to Stockholm, were the weather was fine, from Oslo - where the weather was fantastic, using a specific train. Having never been to the Oslo train station. Went there the day before leaving to get our bearings. There was a notice that the Stockholm trains were leaving 2 hrs ahead of schedule. When we inquired, the tracks were flooded in a certain area. So they were using buses for the first part of the trip, to meet with the train past the flooded area. & to keep the same arrival time, the buses left 2 hrs earlier than the train schedule. They were also asking passengers to verify reservations a day or 2 ahead of time to make sure they had enough buses. Glad we did, because all the buses they had for the day we left were full.