Where can I purchase Thalys tickets without using its website?
Are there well known places/agencies where I can buy Thalys train tickets without having to suffer the bugs, annoyances, and lack of accessibility on thalys.com/vsct.fr?
The site has form validation that rejects perfectly valid email addresses, and payment rejection when the bank claim that no request was ever made.
My plan is to travel from Paris to Brussels, in case there might be an alternative, but I believe they are the only ones with that route.
Edit 1: my plan of not buying online and hoping that ~30 days would still get me a good price was a huge mistake. A ticket for a trip 29 days from now, is costing €148 instead of ~€40!
Best Answer
neat. Thalys tweeted this question and pointed to www.raileurope.com. which even has better prices then their own website or ticket counters. Do they own that site and upsell on other channels? Or recognize their own site is awful?
Either way, thank you, thalys for helping out even if in this convoluted way. (would be much more help if you instead fixed the email validation on your main site!)
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Answer 2
Another one is trainline.eu
I just checked and it allows to buy Thalys tickets (for a strange astral combination, 1st class was cheaper than 2nd....)
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated. I used it once.
Answer 3
Yet another good website: goeuro.com
By far the simplest booking of any other mentioned so far on this question!
no need to input passport numbers, no problem with credit cards, no broken email validation, no high prices! in fact, it was half the price of any thalys owned sites! and it also show airplane and buses. The only bad thing on this site was zero information regarding luggage. But you can solve that by noting the ticket name and looking up on each company site.
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