I thought I figured it all out… I am travelling with my Interrail Global Pass (mobile) for the first time. My first journey is from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, with ICE 123. In the Netherlands, I have a NS Flex Dal Vrij subscription, which should allow me to travel for free on the Dutch part of the trajectory. I read everything I could find about this, on this forum and on the NS website. So what I did: I added a trip to my pass, manually added a journey to my trip with the ICE 123, starting at Emmerich(Gr), ending in Frankfurt. I brought my NS card but did not check in in Amsterdam. This is how I understand I should do this.
However, the NS personnel on the train made me pay a ticket from Amsterdam to Emmerich(Gr), maintaining that I could only travel on my NS Flex subscription without checking in if I had a ticket from Amsterdam to the border station as well. This cost me 61 Euro (1st class). They did not give me a 50 euro fine.
- Were they right?
- If so, how could I do this in the future, without using my free national journey, which (as far as I understand it) will activate automatically when I enter a journey starting from Amsterdam?