kristiang85
Established Member
- Joined
- 23 Jan 2018
- Messages
- 2,658
Last week (Tuesday) I had a typical nightmare journey on DB as I was trying to get back from Wurzburg to London. Hoping someone here has experience of claiming money back from them, as I've not done it before but I've had a considerable outlay I'd like to get back.
My original itinerary was:
ICE720 - Wurzburg to Frankfurt (1255-1404), 1st Class + seat reservation
ICE14 - Frankfurt to Brussels (1426-1735), 1st Class + seat reservation
(This was all one booking via DB)
Then
EST9167 - Brusells to London (2055-2157)
I thought leaving a 3.5hr gap would suffice for any DB shenanegens, but clearly not!
The ICE720 was delayed massively, running over an hour late by the time it got to Frankfurt. I got messages saying that I would not make my connection and I should use another route where possible. On the Bahn.de website, any leaving from Frankfurt later seemed to take a lot longer and would endanger my connection time, and other DB trains to Belgium were cancelled due to strikes. So the best option seemed to be to continue to Cologne and get a train from there, as there were faster direct routes to Brussels, which the train crew concurred with. I then realised that the only viable connections were in fact with Eurostar/Thalys, so I checked with the crew again and they confirmed my ticket was not valid on those, but due to disruption and the fact that I would miss my Eurostar without it, they could let me on if there was space.
The EST9472 from Cologne to Brussels was also delayed, so was at the platform when I got to Cologne. After being shuttled between various people, what seemed to be the train manager confirmed I could not use my DB ticket on the train and I'd have to buy a new one for €72. Weighing up the likely cost of changing my Eurostar to the next day, I decided to get on this one. (Then he had the cheek to charge me €97 for buying on the train ("it is the surcharge" *shrug*, which would have been nice to have been told when I asked him how much it would cost me!). They told me to claim it back from DB).
Anyway, I made it to Brussels and made my connection.
However, it was a less than satisfactory day. DB gave me a bit of paper to manually claim back *by post* (!!), but told me I'd be entitled to 25% refund of my ticket for an hours delay and 50% for 2 hrs. My questions are:
- The form doesn't seem to be very flexible with describing the problems I had, can I add a letter or will that be ignored?
- Can I get a refund not just on the delay but also the difference in having a first class ticket which I didn't use on the second segment? (although I did get a very good advance price)
- Can i get refunds on my seat reservation for train #2?
- How likely is it I'll get my €97 back? Will I need to show evidence I had a connection in Brussels to make, or will they disregard that if there were connections to Brussels later on?
- Is there a German version of something like RealTimeTrains so I can check the journey history? (as they ask for specific times, and in my rushing about trying to sort things I did not record this myself).
Thanks for any help anybody can offer!
My original itinerary was:
ICE720 - Wurzburg to Frankfurt (1255-1404), 1st Class + seat reservation
ICE14 - Frankfurt to Brussels (1426-1735), 1st Class + seat reservation
(This was all one booking via DB)
Then
EST9167 - Brusells to London (2055-2157)
I thought leaving a 3.5hr gap would suffice for any DB shenanegens, but clearly not!
The ICE720 was delayed massively, running over an hour late by the time it got to Frankfurt. I got messages saying that I would not make my connection and I should use another route where possible. On the Bahn.de website, any leaving from Frankfurt later seemed to take a lot longer and would endanger my connection time, and other DB trains to Belgium were cancelled due to strikes. So the best option seemed to be to continue to Cologne and get a train from there, as there were faster direct routes to Brussels, which the train crew concurred with. I then realised that the only viable connections were in fact with Eurostar/Thalys, so I checked with the crew again and they confirmed my ticket was not valid on those, but due to disruption and the fact that I would miss my Eurostar without it, they could let me on if there was space.
The EST9472 from Cologne to Brussels was also delayed, so was at the platform when I got to Cologne. After being shuttled between various people, what seemed to be the train manager confirmed I could not use my DB ticket on the train and I'd have to buy a new one for €72. Weighing up the likely cost of changing my Eurostar to the next day, I decided to get on this one. (Then he had the cheek to charge me €97 for buying on the train ("it is the surcharge" *shrug*, which would have been nice to have been told when I asked him how much it would cost me!). They told me to claim it back from DB).
Anyway, I made it to Brussels and made my connection.
However, it was a less than satisfactory day. DB gave me a bit of paper to manually claim back *by post* (!!), but told me I'd be entitled to 25% refund of my ticket for an hours delay and 50% for 2 hrs. My questions are:
- The form doesn't seem to be very flexible with describing the problems I had, can I add a letter or will that be ignored?
- Can I get a refund not just on the delay but also the difference in having a first class ticket which I didn't use on the second segment? (although I did get a very good advance price)
- Can i get refunds on my seat reservation for train #2?
- How likely is it I'll get my €97 back? Will I need to show evidence I had a connection in Brussels to make, or will they disregard that if there were connections to Brussels later on?
- Is there a German version of something like RealTimeTrains so I can check the journey history? (as they ask for specific times, and in my rushing about trying to sort things I did not record this myself).
Thanks for any help anybody can offer!