I think I paid a booking fee of £8 + £2.25 postage at Voyages SNCF/Rail Europe for my Barcelona - Montpellier tickets.
I certainly think that I will seriously consider using Ffestiniog Travel for any continental travel in the near future. RSTL seem to have seriously got in wrong when they took the contract away from DB UK (if indeed that is what happened).
It would be good to hear what is being done (if anything) to sort things out at International Rail/bookmyrst.
RSTL have said that IR got the contract because DB didn't bid on the renewal. DB intended to close the Surbiton office, which they subsequently did.
IR was given the contract because they were the only ones to bid for the work. The handover was complicated by DB giving a low estimate of the level of work to expect, and leaving a significant backlog.
Source:
Facebook post
I've since read a rumour somewhere else that IR are in the process of hiring some of the ex-DB staff that were made redundant from Surbiton, which should help relieve the pressure.
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I recently went to trainseurope at St Pancras to try booking a two-week holiday involving a combination of FIP coupons and reduced-rate tickets.
The woman was as helpful as she could be, but she couldn't get the computer to book tickets without seat reservations, and she couldn't make the reservations start or finish at a station not named on the ticket. Basically, she couldn't do tickets and reservations as separate transactions. All I ended up buying from her was a Thalys ticket which was global priced with mandatory reservations.
In addition, it appeared that she was using an abysmal 1.15 exchange rate to Euros. It should be closer to 1.40.
In the end, though, I was really glad she couldn't do it, because when I got home I phoned up OeBB who spoke excellent English and were happy to sell me a Vienna-Milan sleeper supplement/reservation, which I could collect from a machine in Vienna when I get there. I then reserved Berlin-Prague-Vienna seats online from ČD's website for print-at-home. I then phoned up NS International and got reservations from quite possibly the most pleasant customer service agent I've ever dealt with, which she emailed to me as a PDF.
It was about half an hour of international calls at 2p per minute (using call2call.co.uk) with agents who spoke excellent English and knew exactly what I wanted.
And I even got to pay in Euro and Koruna on my no-exchange-fees credit card, avoiding the abysmal rates the travel agents charge.
My point is: While the travel agents do have their place- for example, not all routes offer e-tickets- if you already know what you want you may be better off going direct.