Trains & Railpasses: Is Eurailing worth it?
"Don't get me started on Eurail, you might lose some custom, but it is a bit of a con to pay and then virtually have to reserve every damn seat you sit on for extra big money."
Ouch. After all, we sell these through BootsnAll. They help keep the lights on.
But I see his point. Are rail passes worth it?
That came in an email from Neville Millen, just home in Australia after two months in Europe, so he knows what he is talking about. He was sore about having to "book extra reservations at $11 Euro each seat to get on the rapid trains which we mostly needed", and he still thought the pass was good value. Plenty of hard-bitten travellers were not so sure.
Here is the uncomfortable part, written a long time after he sent that: he is still right, and the number has gone up.
What has changed since Neville wrote in
Quite a lot, and none of it touches his complaint.
- Eurail and Interrail are one thing now. Type eurail.com into a browser and you land on interrail.com. Same pass, one brand.
- The Global Pass covers 33 countries. That is a bigger map than the four separate passes people used to stitch together.
- The pass lives on your phone, in the Rail Planner app, though you can still get a paper one. You activate a travel day in the app and show the screen.
- You pick continuous or flexi. Continuous means every day inside the window. Flexi means a set number of travel days to spend when you like, and five or seven days inside one month are the common shapes.
And the catch is the same catch
Reservations are not included in the pass. They never were, and that is still where the money goes.
- France, Spain and Italy are the expensive ones. Nearly every fast or intercity train there needs a reservation before you are allowed to board, pass or no pass, and you should reckon on ten euro and up for each one.
- Night trains always need one, in every country, even in first class.
- Nightjet fees now move like airfares. Since 2024 they are dynamic, so the same berth costs what demand says it costs: roughly 5.50 to 19.90 euro for a seat, 19.90 to 64.90 for a bunk in a six-berth couchette, and 29.90 to 94.90 for a four-berth.
- Germany, Austria, Switzerland and most of central Europe are the opposite. Turn up, find a seat, sit in it. This is where a pass feels like the thing it was sold as.
So do the sum before you buy. Ten euro a train, four trains a week, two months on the road, and Neville's "extra big money" is most of a second pass.
When the pass wins, and when it does not
It wins when you are making a lot of long hops, when you do not know on Monday where you will be on Thursday, when you want to take night trains, and when your route sits in the countries where reservations are optional.
It loses when your trip is a few long journeys you could book months ahead, because advance point-to-point fares undercut it badly, and when you are spending your time in France, Spain and Italy, where you pay the reservation on top every single time.
Which is the same answer as ever, really. The better you understand what you want to do, where, and on what trip, the better you can evaluate the transportation options. The better you understand the transportation options, the better you understand how to use them to accomplish what you want. Research and what you see on websites may well fall apart once you are in the thick of the actual experience, but it is still the only way in.
So: is Eurailing worth it? I still think so, for a trip like mine. What I would not do is buy one without pricing the reservations first.
To railpass, or not to railpass?
Posted 24 June 2003 by Ant in Eurail Planning, reservations · updated by Chris