raileurope.com.au review by higherthanexpectedcallvolumes

Let's face it, even more than their occasional rudeness to visitors, the greatest attribute of the French, when it comes to tourism, is that they're as charmingly incompetent as everyone else in Europe, but with the unpleasant added dimension of obsessive bureaucracy and a deluded belief that they're not incompetent. 

Precisely so it's proved to be with their local website for booking train services.

It's great to be able to book and pay in Aussie dollars. But does the site actually work? Not quite - either in Australia or when you try to give effect to your bookinh

To begin with, when I made an error with my booking but before I'd confirmed payment (so that, I was hoping, I could go back and fix the details before then proceeding to payment), the site went ahead and processed my payment anyway.

Then, I wanted to cancel the booking so that I could then book correctly. This I could not do on the site. Is there someone you can speak to? Only if you look them up outside the site. They don't want to hear from you, it seems, and the guy on the phone more or less complained that I had tracked him down.

As to cancelling bookings, they can only cancel the entirety of the booking (not just the bit of the booking you got wrong, in my case one leg of a multi-leg European train journey). This they agreed over the phone to do and assured me I could then re-book the journey. They also assured me it was all academic, anyway, because, they claimed, they don't actually charge your credit card until you obtain your train ticket at or near the time of travelling.

So I went ahead and re-booked and re-paid (or, at least, put in my credit card details).

Then, the next piece of French admin. genius. They contacted me to say that they had been able, with my original booking, to reverse one of the booked legs of my journey and refund that amount to my credit card (remember, they'd just told me they didn't charge the card at all, so why they had to refund, they couldn't explain).

But, they said, they hadn't been able to stop my card being charged for the next leg of my originally booked journey and would need to deposit that amount back into my credit card. But, they said, they had managed to cancel that booking. Again, remember, none of that makes sense, since they had previously told me one's credit card isn't charged until you actually try to obtain the ticket.

And, in the final twist, when, in Paris, I tried, out of curiosity, to obtain the ticket for which they had wrongly charged me (and which they said they couldn't refund, but which they said they had cancelled), I was actually able to print out the ticket, which it seemed hadn't been cancelled anyway.

In addition, when I had successfully bought a train ticket (the new booking to replace the one I had made with wrong details), I wasn't able to print that ticket at the French railway station (in Cannes). The prominent 'booking reference number' on my Australian internet booking form was, of course, not the one the machine wanted me to enter. It wanted a different number, in tiny writing at the bottom of the form. Even the woman at the railway station counter couldn't find that number, or even my surname (which appeared prominently all over the booking form).

In all, I guess it worked out ok -- I was able to get on my first train; and print out a ticket for my second trip. I will check on my return to Oz if the bit of my booking they were able to cancel has been refunded to my credit card. I will take up their offer to have the other cancelled bit refunded to my account. 

But it shouldn't have been anything like that complicated. And the normally competent Australians were as infected with French combined unhelpfulness/disorganisation/delusion they are administrative geniuses as the French themselves.

Life wasn't meant to be this complicated when giving people money.