Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Traveling Europe by Train. Better to buy a pass, or each trip separately?

My girlfriend and I are planning an European trip 9/26-10/28 and I've come to find all the research one has to do can be a bit daunting, so I come to you for help. If we're planning London - Paris - Amsterdam - Berlin - Prague - Vienna - Venice - Rome. Are we better off buying the Eurorail 10 day Global Pass, or should we just purchase our tickets separately. I've seen that for most night trains and express trains you usually have to pay an additional fee.



Can anyone help us?



Thanks.Traveling Europe by Train. Better to buy a pass, or each trip separately?
There is a great site for rail travel here in Europe that has much more information about railpasses than there is room for in a single answer: http://www.seat61.com/ . This has links to the various national train sites where you can find schedules and prices. The German site is particularly useful for planning schedules throughout Europe: http://www.bahn.de/i/view/USA/en/index.s鈥?/a> . This will also tell you how to determine whether a railpass makes sense for your trip or not. In your case, you might be better off with individual tickets or possibly with a mix of individual tickets and a lesser pass. You cannot use a railpass on the London to Paris train. It is cheaper to buy individual tickets for the Venice to Rome train, especially if you take the night train. It's almost always cheaper to buy individual tickets here in Italy because the basic prices are reasonable for individual tickets, the supplement for a reservation on the fast trains (10 euro) is relatively high when you want to use a pass, and there are discounts available on most fast trains for early purchase. The seat61 site above will tell you how to determine whether a pass is of any value to you on the remainder of the trip and which pass is best.Traveling Europe by Train. Better to buy a pass, or each trip separately?
I was actually just looking into the same question. For me it looks like it will be cheaper to buy them individually since I'm only planning on visiting 3 countries, but because you are going to so many different places I would say the Global Pass is your best bet. You still get the flexibility to ride whenever you want within the allotted period, but bundling all the tickets seems like it saves a lot of money! Definitely look into it a little more just to be sure, though!
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