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Comment by abolibibelot | Hacker News Reader

Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought.

(I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)

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I used capitaine train recently, I love how fast the site is (and how it saves my credentials). No mobile site though (voyages-sncf has a great mobile site, in that it's the bare minimum).

Someone was telling me that capitaine train was having a hard time getting real traction though, hope that things turn out better for them.

Not sure about mobile site but it's probably on the roadmap, they've launched an iPhone app this week: https://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/id599502670

it bothers me that they wouldn't just make the website usable , which reduces pressure for needing an app (I've had to cancel many tickets at the last minute through voyages-sncf on my really old android with a small screen)

Yeah, I always wondered how this could be. Capitaine Train is making money just selling train tickets, without any kind of ad at any point of the process, and that's their only revenue.

On the other hand, we have the official SNCF website, which doesn't even have to be financially successful itself (since SNCF already makes money on the ticket itself), but is littered with ads, slow, ugly and unhelpful. And even PDF train tickets come with half an A4-page worth of ads.

How can this be possible?

EDIT: just looked at the train ticket I printed today, well ok, I was wrong, there is no ad on it anymore, but I'm sure there was at some point.

seszett : it probably depends if you're paying for regular tickets or iDTGV which is a separate organization from SNCF, selling train tickets through the same website. They put ads on their tickets, but they're kind of a low-cost train operator.

Capitaine Train is a registered travel agency, so they can resell SNCF tickets while getting a commission.

You're assuming voyages-sncf == SNCF which is not the case. It's a travel agency whose shareholders are SNCF and Expedia. So they are a private company that have a preferential treatment for which they been condemned once IIRC (not that it changed anything ...).

You're wrong. Expedia has no longer Voyages-SNCF.com parts since this "alliance" was condamned by French Autorité de la Concurrence (anti-trust autority).

Nowadays, the only Voyages-SNCF.com shareholder is Groupe SNCF.

I can find references to a fines but nothing about Expedia leaving Voyages-sncf.com capital. Really curious about it, could you point me to some reference ?

Capitaine Train just released last week an iOS app (https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/id599502670) - wondering what % of their sales mobile now represents

VoyageSNCF has come a long way, and I now prefer it to Capitain Train because it shows the price on a month.

I like the SNCF site, but not the prices.

In the end I find it easier to EasyJet or LyinAir out of SW France.

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