[weinzierl]

"They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF."

I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)

"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."

You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.

What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.

[DominikPeters]

I agree that the booking experience of the DB-SNCF cooperation trains sucks from the DB end, but the underlying blame arguably lies with SNCF which insists on compulsory reservations which is against the philosophy of trains in Germany. On the other hand, in my experience DB offers cheaper tickets for these cooperation trains, most of the time.

But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.

[weinzierl]

This is not primarily a problem of the cooperation trains, I have the same situation with trains within Germany. DB-Navigator only tells you if a train is bookable right at the end, right before payment. Before that, it might show "there is high demand", but this is rather useless, especially when you have a school kid and want to book a train a the beginning or end of school holidays, when every train is in high demand. Your only chance with DB-Navigator is to play the whack-a-mole game where you run all the steps repeatedly until the very last step until you find a train you actually can book.

In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.