Buying Renfe Tickets Online - SUCCESS!!!!

It's pretty well documented that the Spanish railway company RENFE has a website that is very difficult to use if you want to make a purchase with a US credit card. I failed in my first attempt for tickets from Lisbon to Madrid. The next set of tickets I needed was Madrid to Granada. Tickets for that route became available yesterday. Here was my RENFE experience.

Preliminary Information

I'm not the RENFE expert, but I learned a lot from others who are. Check out seat61.com, a great site about European train travel generally and their page on Spanish trains specifically. There is also a nice Tripadvisor thread on using the RENFE site. I strongly recommend reading instructions on those sites before you try to navigate the RENFE purchase process.

Takeaways from my experience

So cutting to the chase, I was able to purchase deeply discounted promotional fares on the RENFE site using a US credit card. Here are some things I learned along the way, some of which overlaps with information from the expert sites, other things that are in addition to information there.

• Medium distance routes become available 62 days before travel. High speed long distance trains are available about 180 days in advance. The other sites talk about 62 days only, but that is for routes that involve a medium distance train. Deepest discounts are available for early purchase.
• Note that for some routes there are limited AVE high speed trains that provide service. Those itineraries are available at 180 days. But if you want full options, including lower speed connections which can sometimes be more convenient for specific travel needs, you have to be within 62 days. Search for a hypothetical date on the same day you want to travel to see if low speed options are better than the high speed options for the dates you need.
• Credit cards are a pain in the butt with RENFE. They use a very specific protocol that, it appears to me at least, is now generally accommodated by European card issuers. Not so much for US card issuers. My Chase MileagePlus Mastercard would not work. This despite being on the phone with Chase while attempting the transaction. The card that worked for me was a State Department Federal Credit Union Visa card. This is a good card to have anyway. No annual fee. A minimalist rewards program. No foreign transaction fees. AND IT IS TRUE CHIP AND PIN!! This is a nice feature to have when in Europe. US cards are headed that way, but for now there are few options and almost none of them come without an annual fee. This card may have been the key in this situation. It makes sense that a State Department FCU card would be more likely than most to work for foreign transactions.
• The other websites indicate that registering with either MasterCard Securecard or Verified by Visa as appropriate helps with the transaction. Neither of my cards had this option (or any of my others), so that was no help. And, clearly, it is not required or I would not have been able to make my purchase.
• When I went through the process, the RENFE site actually said that it could not process my purchase because the same process was already occurring. That was likely a website glitch. A couple minutes after receiving the error message, my tickets arrived by email from RENFE!

UPDATE: Tried a different route, from Ronda to Cordoba that we'll be on a few days later. There was a high speed route available for purchase more than 62 days ahead that worked for us. Used the Chase card with success this time. So, not sure what happened there, but it worked this time. One thing I did different was store the cc info on the RENFE site. But I'm betting my call to Chase yesterday cleared me to make this purchase and the RENFE site took a day to clear this card because it had been rejected so many times yesterday.