We are a Canadian family of 3 travelling in Germany and France on a Eurail pass. Our base is Karlsruhe, where we have family. Today, we are on a little day trip to Paris.
We have activated our Eurail pass for today. Since the train requires reservations, we bought reservations for two ICE trains, one from Karlsruhe to Paris in the morning, and another ICE from Paris back to Karlsruhe in the evening. The reservations were bought through the DB Navigator app.
Everything worked fine inside Germany, but after the border to France there was another ticket check and the person told us that DB reservations are not valid in combination with the Eurail pass. He said he would exceptionally accept it since we were already on the train, but that we would be denied boarding on the way back. He told us to book a reservation through Eurail - but there are no more reservations available on the app and I’m now freaking out about being stranded in Paris with 4 year old tonight.
I find this so confusing, because it specifically says on the Eurail website that you are allowed to reserve through the operator directly (which is DB I assume since it’s an ICE?).
I tried to file a ticket with Eurail, but the form tells you that if your reservation is with the operator they won’t help you. I called Deutsche Bahn, and they didn’t even know what Eurail was!
So now we’re potentially stranded in Paris, with no way to sort this issue out because neither Eurail nor Deutsche Bahn want to help us.
We’re willing to pay the difference if we somehow in this confusing mess bought the wrong kind of reservation, but we just need to get back tonight, preferrably using the seats that we already paid for.
