Solutions for Buying Train Tickets for France in Spite of Credit Card Rejections from Ouigo and SNCF Connect

The French rail operator, SNCF, claims to accept Visa, Visa Electron, MasterCard, American Express, Carte Bancaire and e-CB (French debit cards), and Maestro Card.

But there are many exceptions and problems if you buy from the official site and app:

• American Express cards cannot be used to withdraw purchased tickets from in-station machines.
• Many USA payment cards still haven’t taken up modern EMV secure chips and pins, making Americans’ credit and bank cards incompatible with French ticket machines, apps, and websites.
• Even modern credit cards with chips and verification apps are often rejected, especially from outside of France. In particular, American, Australian, and Canadian users complain that the SNCF sites reject our credit cards outright.
• In some cases, users cannot be sure if their credit card has been charged or not by SNCF sites.
• Various banks’ security measures for online purchases can conflict with the SNCF’s site.
• Worse, the sites sometimes sell you a ticket promising that you can retrieve it from a French ticket machine, which you are then unable to do once at the station in Paris, Bordeaux, or whatever. This can be particularly a problem if your card doesn’t have a chip and pin, but I’ve even had this happen to me personally with a very French bank card. It took literally hours of wrangling with train station staff to get my ticket printed.
• If your credit card is lost, expires, or is stolen in between when you purchase the ticket and when you attempt to retrieve it from a ticket machine, it can also be difficult to impossible to get the ticket issued. (This happened to me once too, I was promised a refund by mail, and sent trip vouchers instead.)
• There are also general refusals to make returns on “refundable” tickets with some of the payment options listed by the SNCF.
• One SNCF Connect user reached out to us to describe problems purchasing a ticket when his phone number was not a French phone number. The website has issues, sometimes, with accepting non-French phone numbers, in this case an American phone number. This has not been an issue at all on the other platforms we recommend.
• Even French users with their French bank cards and French language skills have an incredible number of complaints about their payments being refused. Its Trustpilot rankings are in the toilet.

If you have these or other problems with your using your bank cards, consider the following solutions:

• If your payment method has simply been rejected, caused a website error, or otherwise not gone through, simply note the details of the trip you wanted and skip to the next section on alternative website options for buying your ticket at the same price.
• In some cases your payment may be rejected because the Verified by Visa or MasterCard Identity Check systems of the SNCF are not compatible with those used in your country, particularly we’ve heard of this from readers using American credit cards. This can be solved in some cases by contacting your card issuer by phone, and then retrying the purchase.
• If you’re not sure whether your payment has gone through, check your email for a payment confirmation from the SNCF. If you haven’t received one and it’s not in spam, chances are the payment didn’t go through. You can double-check by contacting your bank or credit card issuer.
• If you have alredy been charged but cannot retrieve your tickets, I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with SNCF customer service. This is, frankly, nobody’s idea of a good time. Also consider challenging any bogus charges with your credit card issuer and doing this promptly. Be careful, as I mentioned SNCF customer service is may try to issue you ticket vouchers (coupons) instead of straight refunds when their haphazard systems screw up. (Refunds and customer service are easier with Trainline.)

There are a few sites that allow you to buy all of the same tickets for French trains and that take foreign cards.

We have found that the best train platform for France overall is Trainline. It accepts Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, American Express, Maestro, Diners Club (UK only), Google Pay, and Apple Pay, and does so flawlessly. Payment works like any normal website, and you immediately receive a completely comprehensible email with your itinerary and receipt. Ticket prices are pulled dynamically to reflect those offered at any particular time by the SNCF system. The only real downside is that there is generally a small booking fee of about 3%.

Trainline is a particularly ideal way for Americans, Canadians, Australians, and others to avoid the hassle and problems that can come from using their national credit cards (with pin and chip, or without) in trying to purchase tickets from the randomly dysfunctional SNCF website. Trainline also avoids the problems of retrieving and printing pre-purchased tickets from ornery French train station machines. All French train tickets from Trainline are E-tickets and do not need to be mailed or picked up.

Trainline is like Google Flights or Skyscanner for trains — it offers very smart routing across European systems and gives you the cheapest possible access to tickets. Trainline also has much better customer service (via email) than the SNCF. It’s consistently my first choice for buying French tickets (even though I now actually have a French bank card).

Another option for tickets in France is Rail Europe, whose website is also clean and easy to use. It accepts MasterCard, Visa, Visa Electron, Maestro, and American Express. It doesn’t offer Ouigo (low-cost budget routes) train tickets however. Like Trainline, prices are the same as those offered at any particular point in time by the SNCF itself on its websites and in its stations, but there’s also a small booking fee.

The SNCF’s French budget trains Ouigo system is still blocking credit cards from certain countries from purchasing tickets at all, through any website. This means that even those booking through Trainline’s system get blocked by Ouigo if they are using a credit card from certain countries.

The current list of approved countries for Ouigo credit card purchases is:

Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, Germany, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Martinique, Mayotte, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Caledonia, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, St Pierre and Miquelon, Sweden, Switzerland, United States and United Kingdom.

If your credit card’s country is not on that list, no payment is possible via Trainline nor Ouigo nor SNCF. Ouigo has blocked payment cards from all other countries! This means even some EU countries are blocked! The solution is again Trainline and in this case even with Trainline you’ll have to pay via Paypal and not a credit card; we’d love to hear from readers if Google Pay and Apple Pay work as well for Ouigo tickets purchased in this way.

So there you have it. In brief, if you haven’t yet been charged, you’re much better off getting tickets through options other than the SNCF itself. And if you have been charged by SNCF but haven’t received your ticket, contact their customer service for some rigmarole.

In May 2023, I chose not to follow my own advice and attempted to book a ticket via SNCF Connect. Partly I did this to update various articles on this site about the experience, and partly to save on the 3% fee that Trainline was charging for a particular trip.

After entering all of my info and American business’ bank card, I got the following error: “Your payment been declined [sic]. Please check with your bank that the card used allows you to make online purchases. To complete the order process, you can choose an option from the basket screen or use a different bank card.” I also got an email stating that “a technical error prevented the validation of your payment “.

Of course there was nothing wrong with my card, it does indeed work for online purchases, and I was able to make the same payment for the same tickets via Trainline ten minutes later.