Deutsche Bahn is now selling British tickets

[U-Bahnfreund]

Looking at https://www.bahn.de/ you can now book (some) tickets within Great Britain using their website. Would be fun to know how well their implementation is. I can hardly imagine anyone at DB knows the ins and outs of British ticketing restrictions and so on. Maybe someone with more expertise might have fun looking at what and how they are selling. I've already seen that in Scotland, DB claims the operator is "Abellio ScotRail Service" for example.

My screenshots show the ticket options sold for the 17:30 train Leicester to St. Pancras on 5 November, and the restrictions shown for the Super Off-Peak Single. I don't even know if that's showing times in the British or the Central European time zone (I'm in Germany).

The translation of the Super Off-Peak restriction explanation: "Your ticket is valid for the selected journey. Off-peak and super off-peak fares do not apply to journeys during peak hours; these vary depending on the operator. If you wish to use a different connection within the validity period of your ticket, please check the relevant validity details in advance."

 

[Bletchleyite]

Interesting. Years ago it used to be possible to buy UK tickets from them but they were Anytimes based on TCV (forget what this stands for) prices rather than "normal" Anytime pricing. I did have one (bought in Germany) once, and issued on a DB blank. The guard accepted it but didn't really know what it was.

 

[Peterthegreat]

Interesting. Years ago it used to be possible to buy UK tickets from them but they were Anytimes based on TCV (forget what this stands for) prices rather than "normal" Anytime pricing. I did have one (bought in Germany) once, and issued on a DB blank. The guard accepted it but didn't really know what it was.

Tarif Commun International pour le Transport des Voyageurs.

 

[Adam Williams]

Well, I did a very straightforward search and this happened!

 

[Starmill]

I believe this is the same as SNCF, Eurostar etc. It just connects to a third party and makes your sale through someone else. This allows for a chain of tickets to be booked as one transaction via different retailers. Let's hope their retail partner didn't just use Google Translate to bring it across from English to German though!

 

[MrJeeves]

This service uses Atomised (potentially through another party). You do get nice whitelabelled tickets from it, at least!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 1 Sep 2026 ==

I've tried to buy tickets for mandatory reservations trains twice and both times it has failed about 60s after starting the purchase with a "booking status unknown" error.

Hopefully my €5 will return to my account at some point!