You dont have to activate your pass to reserve trains as reservations are a complete different process.

You can't change your country of residence. That has to be made by Customer Support if it is possible to change. 

You can just start to make your reservations. You don't need an active pass for that.

The advice from the experienced travellers in the community is to use other ways to make reservations than the Interrail/Eurail website. You can look at the guide in the link:

https://community.eurail.com/train-connections-reservations-47/how-to-get-reservations-105

If you, after having looked at the guide, have questions about how to make specific reservation, please create a new topic with your travel details (departure date, time and route) and you will get advice.

Thanks for the fast reply both of you!

However, to be able to make reservations in the railplanner app, I have to click on “activate pass”, and then chose a date for when the first date of validity should be (which can be a date in the future).

With “you don't have to activate your pass” do you mean that it does not need to be valid yet? Because I am worried that for changing my country of residence I will have to deactivate my pass again and that then all the reservations will be lost.

@AnnaB thanks for the hint to check the status of the request, it actually works! I can only see that the request is still open, but that already gives a better feeling since I know it arrived :)

No you don't. In fact, the app does not book reservations, it just forwards you to some of the websites where you can book them. So if you want to use Interrail for reservations, you can also go directly to their website. I try to avoid that though because of the added fees.

Reservations and pass are separate. You can even book via websites that don't know anything about your pass.

thank you @rvdborgt ! i just tried it out and indeed that works! I thought that I have to make the reservation over the interrail website but this is indeed much more convenient!

But for some trains (for example for ICEs in Germany), you don't have to make a reservation. If I dont make a reservation for those, is there a risk that they are booked out (as in, impossible to board even without reservation) if I only add them on the day before taking them to my journey?

For Germany, my strategy is often that I check a week or so in advance how busy the train is. DB shows an indication in their planner and you can also check by using the seat selection: then you can see in the seating plans how busy the different coaches are.

Gruss aus Deutschland. It very, very seldom sometimes happens-only on very busy days, that ICE trains are stated to be full enough and will not take UNreserved pax. It also happens sometimes that it gets so full ontheway, that they deem its unsafe and offer money to those who leave the train-often it is said to those who stand and cannot find seat.

But as in DE here there is now the 9€ monthly ticket for all transport, except the Fernverkehr =IC/ICE (has much higerh special tariff) that makes some trains on very populair lines so full that noone can even get in anymore=worse as you may have seen from Japan/Tokyo/rush-hour.

Was in DE also @ PInksteren and found that some ICE would not accept new REServ for seats-but then on boarding and expecting the very worst, it turned out all right-the crowds maybe came further on the line.

thanks @mcadv ! Yeah I think in Germany a reservation is worth it, as its also not very expensive!

But actually, the issue remains: Now I have bought my reservations, but I am not sure if I will be able to use them if customer service does not reply in time. Does someone know how long customer service takes to reply to a request these days?

The response time depends on how soon you will be travelling. When you entered the request you hade to indicate how soon your travel will start. People who are currently travelling and those who will travel within 2 weeks are prioritised. 

When does your travel start?

My travel starts next week! When filling in the request I indicated that I will be traveling within 2 weeks.

Even worse: When following the instructions to see the status of my request, I now see that my request is marked as “solved”. However, my country of residence is still incorrect (when checking in my interrail account in the order overview) and I have never received a message from customer service (I also checked my spam folder). Any idea what I can do about that?

Start with reading all information in the request and see if you can find out why Customer Support has closed the issue. If you don’t find a good answer there, then write a new request and refer to the first request and ask why they closed the issue without contacting you. Have you checked your spam mail so that the answer from Support isn’t there?

Yes I have checked my spam folder. I have also read all the information regarding it, but cannot find any explanation or reason. Will indeed submit a new request.

Unfortunately we can't update your country of residence after you've purchased the Pass. This can only be done by ordering a new Pass with the correct country of residence and requesting a refund for your old Pass (a Pass exchange).

@Nanja @Jody 

I see the below confusing text is still shown when ordering a pass:

Passports usually don't mention a country of residence (national ID cards don't always either) but we've seen that some travellers seem to think that they need to select a country that matches something in their passport or on their ID card, after seeing this text. In fact, this text is asking something impossible, is misleading and causing errors.

IMO, as long as this text is still shown, their should be no extra costs to make an exchange to have the country of residence corrected. Alternatively, you could just change the country of residence. We know it is possible technically.

Will look into it and come back to you on this. Thanks for flagging! 

Update: We improved the guidance regarding this and other topics in our new check- out which will be released before December 2022. 

Thank you for the answer. After reaching customer service, we also figured that out. Providing this information somewhere would save a lot of time for both customer service and customers! As currently, the Q&A state to contact customer service to change the country of residence.

On which page is this mentioned? Could you post the URL?

Not sure if I will be able to find the same page again, but I believe it was this in combination with a lot of older community posts

It also needs to be pointed out again that not all countries issue any sort of official ID cards that can in any way be considered proof of residence.

This is a whole area of the validity of these passes that simply doesn’t have a simple solution as there is no document that conveys residential status universally.

Thanks. That page can indeed create false expectations because it looks like customer service is only allowed to change certain information.

@Nanja, I think this page should be changed to mention what information can be changed by customer service and what cannot be changed.

Moderator note: thanks for your feedback. We've adjusted the information on the page to reflect more clearly what can and can't be changed.