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Hello all, hope you’ve had a nice Christmas!

I’m trying to add a journey within my ‘home country’ to my mobile Interrail pass. The problem is, the trains/route I want to take aren’t offered by the app (I think the problem is that the app doesn’t have the most recent timetables), and there’s more than one train/leg involved.

I know how to manually add each train to My Trip, but when I try to create a barcode for this, it warns me that “when adding a journey or leg to your pass to travel in your country of residence, you’ll be prompted to use one of these two journeys. Once you’ve used your outbound and inbound journeys: you’ll not be able to add an additional journey or leg to your Pass to travel on trains in your home country”.

This suggests that I won’t be able to add all the legs of my journey without using a travel day for each leg. As my journey involves more than two legs (and I still need the second ‘home country’ journey for another day!) this clearly isn’t an option.

Does anyone know a workaround for this? Is there some way of manually adding multiple legs to one journey? Or is the warning wrong, and you actually can add multiple legs/“journeys” as long as it’s all just on one day? I don’t want to try it out and potentially waste a valuable ‘home country’ travel day!

Also, can you change the trains in your ‘home country’ trip after you’ve created the barcode, as you can for foreign journeys? For instance, if you change which train you plan to take due to delays or change of plans.

I’m worried that I’m going to have to buy a ticket to make my ‘home country’ journeys, which could be quite expensive. Up until now, the mobile pass has worked great - but this is a limitation that wasn’t set out anywhere in the terms. If there’s no way around it, I feel like the domestic journey element has been missold to me - I shouldn’t be penalised for the fact that the app won’t show the trains I’m taking.

Thanks.

You should be able to add several journeys in your home country on the same travel day (00.00-23.59 CET) but don't activate the travel day until the actual day of your travel. 

What route is it that you can't find in the app?

Here is some useful information from the experienced travellers in the Community regarding both planning, reservations and activation of pass and travel days. 

 Planning

The rail planner is normally not up to date, as it only is updated once a month, so to be sure of the time table you better check the timetable and availability on the websites of the national railways. The bigger national railways, like DB (Germany) SBB (Switzerland) and ÖBB (Austria) cover several countries. 

 Reservations 

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 topic, and you will get advice.

Please note that Interrail/Eurail charges an extra fee of 2 EUR per person and train in addition to the fee for the seat reservation.

 Activation of pass

During the activation process you choose the start day of the validity of the pass. Once the validity has started it can't be changed even if you haven't travelled. The advice is therefore to wait with activating the pass and starting the validity until the first day of your travel as you only can deactivate the pass no later than 23.59 CET on the day before the validity starts. If your travel plans change in the last moment you can't deactivate the pass and change the validity. 

It can be wise to make a test and activate the pass with a start date well in the future and then deactivate the pass immediately, just to see that everything works.

 Activation of travel day

The advice from the experienced travellers in the community is also never to activate a travel day, that is connect a journey to your pass and create the ticket (QR code), until just before boarding the train, otherwise you might loose a travel day if your travel plans change in a late stage  You can't delete a travel day in the past. A travel day can only be deleted until 23.59 CET the day before the travel day.

Please tell us your exact itinerary dates and times - then we can give advice. Also make sure you have downloaded the latest version of the app. as well.

The In/Out rule really confuses people, but in reality it is very simple:

For up to any 2 travel days of your Global Pass you can use your pass in your home country as if it were one of the remaining countries.

A travel day is from 0000 to 2359 CET (note GMT/BST is 2300 - 2259).


The rest of the post is for clarification:


You can board as many trains as you like in any travel day, even if your final train ends after 2359. (Except if you are travelling on the very last day of validity, when your pass is only valid up to 2359, so all journeys need to be completed by 2359)

There are no restrictions on how many trains you travel on within your home country in those 2 travel days, but the app will be very strict on managing those 2 days. It will always advise you if your journey will require one of those days and you have to accept it, so there is no risk of losing them automatically. 

Although called In/Out days there is no problem using it for 2 in or out journeys or not even crossing a border. For example you could use them to get to and from a port for a ferry or cruise, or an airport..

 

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