So last December we signed up for the “BahnCard 25” discount cards, which is a program offered by Deutsche Bahn, the German train company. You pay for a yearly membership fee, but you then get a 25% discount on all your train travel. So last December, we went to the train station and asked to sign up for individual cards, i.e. Chris would have his own BahnCard 25, and I would have my own. There was an option, that we both vaguely remember being mentioned at the time, to have a less expensive “partner” card that would cover the both of us, but the discount it afforded on the yearly membership price was not enough to offset — in our minds — a variety of complications that seemed likely to occur if we went that route. So, we asked for separate cards. When they arrived, they had separate numbers, and we assumed they were indeed separate cards.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, and we realized our current cards will expire on December 25, 2012. We’ve hadn’t yet received new ones, so last week I went to the train station service center, where we’d gotten them, and asked how to renew our memberships. The agent there told me the membership would be automatically renewed, and the cards with next year’s expiration date would arrive soon.

BTW, in talking to friends after that, we  discovered that this automatic renewal thing is a sore point with people in Germany, since it’s never made clear up front that you’ll automatically be charged for another year. Also, it’s apparently  hard to figure out how to get it not to renew. That is likely to be a problem we’ll need to figure out some day.

But for right now, we ideally need to get the new cards before December 28th, when we’re scheduled to take a train trip again, as we’ll be asked to flash these cards on the train to show that we have them, since the rate we got for the tickets was based on having these cards.

So, this morning, a friend helped me call the BahnCard service center, to find out what had happened to our new cards. The information she got was that because we’d gotten “partner” cards originally, we needed to send copies of our IDs in to the main Deutche Bahn service center before the cards would be renewed.

But we hadn’t gotten those partner cards last year, or so we thought.

After a trip to the train station service center to find out if this was all a big mistake, it turned out that in fact we’ve always had partner cards, even thought we didn’t want them. But, as the Deutsche Bahn agent explained to me this morning,  the agent last year would of course have issued our cards as partner cards, because it’s cheaper.

But … but … last year we said we didn’t want partner cards, we wanted separate  cards. The agent this morning just gave me a look, and re-explained that well, partner cards are cheaper … the tone of her voice indicating the unspoken, “so of course that’s what you wanted, even though you said you didn’t want it.”

How helpful … not. We were actually correct in our assessment last year that the partner cards were going to cause problems. Separate cards would have been renewed automatically. However,  our renewal has not been done automatically because Chris and I need to prove that we live together. You see, you qualify to get the partners card discount if you

a. Are married

or

b. Live together

Now, Chris and are I married, of course, but not in Deutsche Bahn’s eyes, because our last names are different. Here in in Germany, as in the U.S., the custom is for the woman to change her last name. As in the U.S., most women do, but it is legal not to.  However, there is no way to prove to Deutsche Bahn that we’re married when our last names are different; neither our matching rings nor our marriage license will do.

But even though Deutsche Bahn doesn’t consider us to be married, we can still get partner cards by proving we live together.That’s the catch – you have to prove it, you can’t just sign a form and attest to it. Well, you can sign a form, but you must file a form each year that states that you are still living together.

See, separate cards would have been much simplier. The savings we get from the partner card status are truly not that exciting.

Now, I realized this morning that I did actually get a letter about this last month, but the way it was worded, it read more like some sort of fake advertising. In very flowery wording the letter exclaimed something like “Congratulations on having decided to apply for a Partner Bahncard! Fantastic! All we need you to do is send in every bit of personal ID and other identifying information you can lay your hands on, and we’ll be happy to decide about your eligibility for you new Partner Bahncard. You know, the one you recently applied for!”

OK, well, that is an over-the-top oversimplification of what it said, but it really did ask for all kinds of personal information that an ID theft kind of scam might want. And since I knew I hadn’t recently applied for a Partner Bahncard – moreover, I didn’t even know what a Partner Bahncard was – I just threw the letter away.

But it turns out it was a real letter from Deutsche Bahn, that was in some way supposed to alert us that we have actually had Partner Bahncards all along, and to renew them we really do need to send in copies of our German ID cards. So, I needed to send an email today with scans of our official German IDs to the main Deutsche Bahn service center, in hopes that they will send the new (renewed) cards out to us before December 28th. I am not optimistic that they will arrive in time, as there are exactly 2 days with postal service between now and then, tomorrow and December 27.

But, you never know. Hope – and the Deutsche Bahn agent’s faith in the German Postal Service springs eternal, and all that.

In any case, there was nothing else to do, as the service center here in Tübingen where we initially signed up for the cards,  could not renew them for us today, even though they could see the IDs on the counter in front of them. They also would not let me cancel the current cards and buy new ones, since (apparently) we signed the contract for the Partner Cards last year, and it would take many more forms to undo that, which wouldn’t be processed until next year.

Don’t ask – in Germany there’s always a form “for that”, no matter what “that” is.

Now, on December 27th, the local service center will be able to print out a form that says our BahnCard 25 cards are still valid, which will be handy, since we will need to show proof we have those discount cards on December 28th, when we journey to Verona using discounted tickets (purchased with our cards). The agent couldn’t print out that sheet for me today, though, since the main service center had not yet received the scanned copies of our IDs. You know, the copies of the IDS that that local service agent could see right in front of her. Nope, I need to walk back over to the train station on December 27th to get that other form. Unless the real cards should happen to arrive in the mail before then, of course.

BTW, lest you come away with the impression that the service people at the Deutsche Bahn are just trying to be helpful and save their customers money, let me offer one more anecdote about what happened last week when I went to buy the tickets for that trip we’re taking on December 28th.

Having looked up the price for the tickets online, I noted that there was an extra-special discount available on the itinerary that required taking the 8:15am train from Tübingen. The price was 250 euros for 2 people, round-trip, versus 400 euros.

Naturally, I wanted to buy the tickets for 8:15 am train.

Normally, I might have just purchased the tickets online. However, I also wanted to ask the service center at the train station how to renew our BahnCards, and so I decided that rather that buy the tickets online, I’d just print out the itinerary I wanted and then do both the renewal and the ticket purchasing at the train station. After all, there is no discount offered for buying tickets online for the trains in Germany – the same prices should be available both online and at the station.

So, when I got to the station, the same man who informed me (incorrectly, as it turned out) that our BahnCards would renew automatically, then took my printout of the itinerary I wanted for December 28th and looked it up in his computer. He informed me that the price would be 400 euros. I politely insisted that not 20 minutes earlier I had printed out that itinerary, with a price fo 230 euros. So he showed me his computer screen… and I saw that he had selected the 8:00 am train, not the 8:15am train. I explained that the price I’d seen was only available for the 8:15 train, and so that’s the train I wanted.

I was completely taken aback when he refused to look up the 8:15 am train. He said all the trains were the same price, and it was ridiculous to think otherwise, and the total journey time for the trip leaving at 8:00am would be 20 minutes shorter than the trip leaving at 8:15am. So, of course, it would be just better to take the 8:00am train.

Even when I said I really wanted him to give me the price for the 8:15am train, he politely but firmly insisted that I should just take the 8:00 am train since that would be better and also the same price as the later train, since the train prices were the same. 5 minutes of polite arguing ensued. End result? No, he never would look up the price for the 8:15am train.

Deutsche Bahn ticket agents: taking the notion of “my way or the highway” to a new level.

Anyway, I wound up going back home, connecting to the online site, and booking the 8:15am train … for 230 euros.

Take that, Deutsche Bahn. I may not have gotten the BahnCard I wanted, but at least I did the ticket booking my way.