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Eurail Global (Paper) Pass despatch delays

I ordered our passes by 7 June 2022.  

Eurail shows payment as received, but hasn’t yet sent the passes by mail.  It claims we will receive these by 16 July 2022.

We are in Australia and depart for overseas towards the end of September 2022.

With previous Eurail Golbal Passes years ago, I had always bought a paper pass locally from a Eurail-affiliated travel agent, but the only one in Melbourne I tracked down said it only sells mobile passes (at a substantial added cost to the price the Eurail site charges.

We don’t want mobile passes as I can’t rely on smartphones, and as a bonus I enjoy filling in the record of travel and posting it to Eurail once back in Australia.

I realise the Eurail office is likely to be very busy (and perhaps is having difficulty obtaining sufficient staff) but there’s not even a Eurail Aid office in London, UK, Paris or France yet the UK is where we commence our travel.

It’s impossible to book seats on compulsory reserved seat trains until we have the paper Pass numbers.

While Australia has a small population of only 26 million, per capita we are one of the highest purchasers of Eurail passes, zooming past Americans with their 15x higher number of residents.

How many weeks or days from receipt of an order and payment is Eurail typically mailing paper Eurail (and Interrail!) Passes?

15 replies

A
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The delivery time is around 2 months at the moment.

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 give your travel details (departure date, time and route) preferably in a new post, and you will get advice. 

Please note that I don't work for Interrail/Eurail and that I don't reply to personal messages.
T
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Thanks, but one cannot make bookings for a Paper pass without the ‘pass number’, whichever method one chooses.

For the TGVs on the Paris to Barcelona route, correct me if I’m wrong, but online reservations are paper not electronic, so impractical for Eurailers who reside in America, Australia, Canada et al.

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The best way to make reservations for French trains is to call SNCF. No need of Pass Cover Number. 

https://www.sncf.com/en/customer-service/contact-us/telephone

 

 Press #85 for English, no booking fees, reservations are sent via e-mail

 

Please note that I don't work for Interrail/Eurail and that I don't reply to personal messages.
T
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Thank you.

A
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 doubtless SNCF require a Pass number, which I cannot give until these arrive in the mail.

They don't if you call them. 

Please note that I don't work for Interrail/Eurail and that I don't reply to personal messages.
T
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Thanks: I was too slow to delete that.

A
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You can contact Customer Support and ask them to send you the Pass Cover Numbers. The best is to contact them through this form.

https://eurail.zendesk.com/hc/en-001/requests/new

Customer Support is overloaded with requests so you need to clearly write what date you will start travelling so that Customer Support can prioritise your request correctly.

Please note that I don't work for Interrail/Eurail and that I don't reply to personal messages.
T
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Many thanks!  I’ve done that, so will advise if I receive a reply.  I don’t expect one within a week, that’s for sure.

T
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To my surprise, I received an overnight quick reply from Eurail.

It supplied a Pass Number for we two, and I was able to use it to book reservations.

The reply mentioned ‘Mobile Pass’ even though ours will be the traditional Paper Passes: I reckon this was just a generic reply to all.

 

R
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It supplied a Pass Number for we two, and I was able to use it to book reservations.

The reply mentioned ‘Mobile Pass’ even though ours will be the traditional Paper Passes: I reckon this was just a generic reply to all.

It probably was. Pass cover numbers are not printed on the reservations anyway, except for Italian reservations booked via Eurail, but those can be booked cheaper via ÖBB anyway.

Please ask questions in the community and not via a private message. That's the quickest way to get a response. I don't work for Eurail/Interrail.
T
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My wife’s Global continuous Paper Eurailpass was ordered on 7 June 2022.

Eurail’s mailing packet shows it as signed for mailing from Utrecht, Netherlands on 26 June 2022, which was a Sunday.  Assuming it was actually mailed on Monday 27 June (which with the time difference could be early AM Tuesday 28 Australian east coast time), that I received it by noon today from my friendly Australia Post postman means it took just eight business days to reach Melbourne, which is pretty good as all international mail arriving is liable to go through security before being made available to Australia Post delivery centres for local sorting.

So the delay from receipt of an order by Eurail to us receiving Eurailpasses is nowhere near ‘two months’ as one European poster claimed above, at least for nations with reliable postal systems.

My wife’s Paper Pass continues to have blank ‘first day’ and ‘last day’ dates to be filled in by the booking office that stamps the pass, as has always been the case.  Again, one other poster above claimed that this was no longer the case.

Strangely there was no paper guide and timetable as previous Eurailpasses years ago contained when they arrived by mail.  These have perhaps been discarded in favour of the App plus (say) the bahn.de and nationalrail.co.uk online timetables, as well as other details on eurail.com 

Thankfully it is very easy to download extra ‘My Trip’ pages from the Eurail.com website: we will need them as we will use our passes extensively, including in my case in the UK.

 

 

 

R
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It seems Eurail are slowly catching up. I noticed they've shortened the predicted delivery times a bit.

AFAIK, the pass guide is no longer printed but are stil available as a PDF, although it doesn't contain as much information anymore.
 

Please ask questions in the community and not via a private message. That's the quickest way to get a response. I don't work for Eurail/Interrail.
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I purchased my Eurailpass a day before I bought my wife’s one.

As noted above, hers (an adult pass) arrived on Friday 8 July.  Mine (senior’s pass) arrived before 1200 AEDT on Monday 11, the next Australia Post delivery day, having been ordered on 6 June 2022, so thanks to PostNL in The Netherlands, the airline that carried these priority packets and Australia Post for being reliable.

My pass never had a visible ‘tracking number’ on this site, so the moral is, don’t panic if you can’t see one.  Oddly, my wife’s had a tracking number as noted above.

Both passes have the blank spaces to write ‘from’ and ‘to’ validity dates, as I always expected they would.  So when ordering a Paper Eurailpass, you do NOT need to specify a starting date: the only requirement is for travel to commence before the specified expiration date (11 months from date of issue, which seems to be the date Eurail receives payment, not the date it mails the pass to the traveller).

rvdborgt, my delivery experience further buttresses your suggestion that Eurail BV in Netherlands is ‘catching up.’  Well done also to its staff in Utrecht, as Eurail suggested our paper passes would be delivered before 16 July 2022, and this occurred.

 

 

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For September 2023 travels, I ordered a two month Global Eurail1st class paper pass on 5 March 2023.

It was efficiently despatched from the Netherlands on Monday 6 March and delivered to my inner Melbourne house by my Australia Post postman (‘postie’) on Friday 17 March 2023 before 1200 AEDT.

Great work by Eurail, Netherlands Post, Australia Post and airline staff.

Very pleasing that there aren’t the lengthy delivery delays encountered last year.

I prefer a paper pass as I cannot trust my smartphone to work everywhere internationally. As long as one is careful with it, it’s a far nicer travel record than a mobile pass and more reliable.

A
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I prefer a paper pass as I cannot trust my smartphone to work everywhere internationally. As long as one is careful with it, it’s a far nicer travel record than a mobile pass and more reliable.

My daughter and I also used the paper pass last year. I like writing down all the trains on the lined paper and after the trip it gives a great memory.

I also added all our journeys in a Trip in the Railplanner app just to get the statistics of the travelled distance, hours travelled, and cities and countries visited.

Please note that I don't work for Interrail/Eurail and that I don't reply to personal messages.

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