Would you consider or have you used the ferries in our network?

I’ve used the Ancona - Patras route to go from Italy to Greece with Anek-Superfast Ferries. It is a lovely journey approx 24 hours. You can buy a interrail passholder fare but you don’t use a day of your pass.  It is best to book a cabin if you can afford it. At Ancona it possible to walk to the ship from the train station, it’s a bit of a walk but nothing like Bari.

There is also a hotel in Ancona close / overlooking the harbour. 
I have also done the trip from Patras to Bari. When you arrive in Bari, the quay some distance from the town. 

In my opinion Ancona-Patras with Anek Superfast is the best route to Greece if you Sidonio ‘t have the time to go through Eastern Europe where train connections have been lost since Covid. 

Hi,

I’ve used ferries in Italy and Greece, as well as to travel from Tallinn to Helsinki, from the Netherlands to the UK, and between Scotland and Belfast. I’m planning a trip that includes Malta — is there a ferry with an Interrail discount?

Every time, I’ve had a great experience. I really enjoy the transition from riding the rails to sailing on ferries. Connecting between the two has never been a problem. Prices may vary depending on the season.

If there are more ferry options available, I’d definitely be interested in checking them out!

I’d like to take more ferries, but I find it very hard to see what’s available from Interrail.

I can never remember which companies (and which routes from a company) are part of the partnership. And then I can’t remember which ones offer a discount, which offer a ‘free’ travel, and whether I ned to use a travel day or not.

In my experience, most of the ferries I’ve checked seem to offer a small discount, and even then only a small element of the total fare is discounted.

I’ve concluded that it’s not worth factoring in the Interrail discount when planning. I find the ferries first, and then if I can get a discount it’s a bit of a bonus.

I normally check ferry schedules on Direct Ferries. If you could partner with them, to offer a passholder booking portal, that would make checking prices and schedules a lot easier.

“I’ve concluded that it’s not worth factoring in the Interrail discount when planning. I find the ferries first, and then if I can get a discount it’s a bit of a bonus.”

Same for me.  Bonus points for a discount, but it’s really a question of whether there is a ferry between where I am and where I want to be.  The general options for foot passengers are limited now compared to the 80s and 90s, so I don’t think there’s much you (the Interrail crew) can do on this front.

I’m planning a journey from my home country Finland to my country of residence in Belgium. It’s impossible to make this journey without a ferry. It would be amazing if some ferries between Finland and Sweden and Finland and Tallinn could be included or you could get a discount for the use of the pass. 

There are discounts on several ferry operators in that region, including Tallink-Silja, Finnlines, Eckero, Viking Line, Stena Line, Polferries…

https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/deals

It is actually possible to do this by train: via Kemi/Tornio-Haparanda-Boden to Stockholm. You'll have to take a short bus ride or walk across from Tornio to Haparanda though.

I think ferries are most worthwhile when travelling with a flexi-pass, because they usually don't use up a travel day and allow you to stretch out your travel a bit with the benefit of a modest-but-welcome discount. Night routes can often be quite time-efficient too. As I come from the UK, starting a trip by sea always feels like a very proper experience to me, and customs are less of an ordeal than on the Eurostar because there is more space in the terminal building and fewer foot passengers.

For my money, the best discounts are with Viking Line Helsinki <> Stockholm (50% cabin discount on top of a typically low base fare), and Stena Line Harwich <> Hoek van Holland (where the 30% base fare discount is also applicable to their premium fare including lounge access and a light cooked breakfast).

When travelling from Hoek you need to use the metro (€4) to get there from Rotterdam, so quite a nice thing to do is to arrive in Rotterdam a couple of evenings before, spend a full day there, and then the next day (the day of your overnight ferry), buy a day pass for the metro (€11) which you can use for a day out in Den Haag at the end of the other line, before briefly returning to Rotterdam to collect your luggage and heading off to the ferry at Hoek in the evening.

I wasn't all that impressed with the ferry I took between Igoumenitsa and Bari, which was covered by the pass, because there were quite a few surcharges which reduced the value and in order to travel on a pass at all you have to travel on deck (2nd) or in a seat (1st) overnight and aren't allowed to upgrade to a shared cabin.

If there was one ferry company I'd appreciate Interrail opening a relationship with it would probably be Brittany Ferries, as they link the UK and Ireland to Spain and France, running all the Channel crossings west of Newhaven and also connecting the Channel Islands to France and the UK mainland, with most routes available as well-timed overnight crossings in at least one direction.

With the level of surcharges they now add on, I don't regard Superfast/Anek anymore to be "covered by the pass”, but rather only offering a discount. They're only really covered by the 6-day Greek Islands pass, for which you don't need to pay any surcharges (other than accommodation if you want that). AFAIK, you CAN upgrade to a cabin with a global pass, since that's what they write themselves:

https://www.superfast.com/en-gb/special-offers/sail-rail

I wouldn't be surprised though if you can only book accommodation with a discount onboard the ship, or at check-in, which greatly reduces the value of it, especially during high season.

Yes, that would be an excellent addition.

Yeah, but given that it is "free" according to their own terminology, even with all the surcharges, I assume a travel day is required (hope I'm wrong on this). And annoyingly you have to book at least one way with them on an international passage before you can unlock the much better offering of a 30% discount on domestic routes and no travel day required.  This means there is no discount on most (or maybe even any, can't remember) ferries in the Ægean for passholders who don't plan to visit Italy as well.

Well spotted, not sure this is mentioned anywhere on the Interrail website or the advantages Portal.

I assume you say this because the online booking system still won't allow it; it certainly didn't when I tried my luck several years ago. :-/

Quite a disappointing company, all told!

When I started interrail travel back in the 1970st there was no Storebelt connection (bridge and tunnel), no Öresund bridge and no Channel tunnel. So a part of Denmark (Sjælland), Sweden, Norway, Great Britain and also Finland (travelling through the Soviet Union was not an option) could not be reached without using a ferry from Central Europe. For Ireland this is still the case and Finland can nowadays without flying only be reached by ferry over the Baltic Sea or via Haparanda and Tornio where a bus must be used to Kemi, which is included in the Interrail pass. Thus for me ferries are an integral part of travel without flying and my wife and me had used them often when traveling with or without an Interrail pass.

When we started interrailing again 2 years ago, our destination was Norway and we took the ferry from Frederikshavn in Denmark to Göteborg in Sweden and continued by train to Oslo. Last year, and we will do the same in two weeks, we took the Ferry from Gdynia in Poland to Karlskrona in Sweden. On both ferries was a discount of 20% for Interrail pass holders, but this applied only to the basic fare. Not for harbour fees and other charges (environmental fee) and not for accommodation. Overnight accommodation on trains is also not included in the pass, so its also okay with ferries, I think. I do not think that ferries should generally  be included in the pass, as this would make the pass more expensive. Certainly a large fraction of global pass users have travel patterns where ferries are pointless. Maybe there could be a more significant discount on routes which are necessary to reach a specific destination or make it much easier, e.g. Ireland or Greece.

Glad you agree, and I really hope they will consider it because Brittany Ferries are very good for plugging gaps. Their routes conveniently link or are at least a viable distance away from a lot of insular and peninsular areas - Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland - basically anywhere that has been called a variant on "the end of the world" since antiquity. The sorts of areas that would involve a lot of retracing your steps to leave after visiting if you had to keep to the rails, which is always a killer for itinerary planning.