Buy second-hand train tickets

Internet sites which sell second-hand train tickets can offer useful savings.

One of the most popular of these www.zepass.com claims it has 65,000 people signed up to use its service and sells several thousand tickets a month.

Sites like this (others include www.trocdesprems.com and www.kelbillet.com) benefit those who have bought a non-exchangeable or non-refundable train ticket that they can no longer use, as well as those seeking reduced-price tickets.

Zepass.com spokesman Quentin Schaepelynck said the service was free for sellers, but buyers pay a fee of €1.50 - 2.00 to secure the ticket for 24 hours before they are given details of the seller.

“This guarantees that the seller only deals with that person and the cost is offset by the savings you will make on the ticket,” he said.

He added the most popular method of purchase was by PayPal, which provided a guarantee to the buyer in case of any problem with receiving the purchase.

“This offers psychological comfort but in practice there are very few problems,” he said.

In about half of cases the buyer and seller make arrangements for physical collection of the ticket, he added.

In others it is done by post or over the internet or text on a mobile phone. He said the average discount on a ticket’s purchase price was 15%.

It may be more or less but may not legally be more than the seller paid.

He said the service was most commonly used for long-distance journeys - known as grandes lignes by the SNCF - including TGV and Corail trains.

“The most typical example is someone who has bought a Prem’s ticket (a non-reimbursable ticket that is cheap if bought well in advance). Let’s say a Paris-Lyon ticket they bought three months in advance. It might cost about €20-25.

“However, if you find out a week before travelling that you can’t use it, you might sell it on the site for about €15 - 20. By that time, if a buyer wanted to buy that ticket from the SNCF they would pay about €60, so they are getting a big saving on the cost. On average, tickets are sold two to one week before the journey takes place.”

An SNCF spokeswoman said trading in second hand tickets on the internet was legal. She said non-refundable or reimbursable tickets on les grandes lignes included all the bottom-priced tickets, promotional offers and ID TGV tickets (low-cost TGV tickets that can only be bought online).

She added that you should not buy a ticket if it is a kind that has to be printed off at home (rather than a traditional ticket) and the original purchaser has finalised the transaction (which includes a definitive declaration of the passenger’s name) and printed it.

However, if they merely reserved it online and did not finalise the process, this is acceptable. She added that you should take care that the seller did not buy the ticket under special conditions - for example, using a carte senior or enfant + (for elderly people or people travelling with a child under 12).

Note that it is not legal to resell Eurostar tickets via third parties like these sites.