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I am going around in circles trying to work out how to reserve tickets on Spanish high speed trains. My family and I are flying in to Spain but thought we would take the train back across Europe. 

 

My problems are that I need to make seat reservations but trying to do that via an online search just takes me to sites that are set up for ticket purchasing not ticket reservations. It would be easier (I expect) to use the interail.eu tool, but for reasons that are unclear my trip details don’t appear on the online account I set up. Neither does it appear possible to query this with the interrail.eu as they don’t seem to respond to emails or accept phone calls. 

 

This is all very frustrating and worrying, Can somebody help?

There is no connections between your interrail.eu account and "My Trip" in the app so that's the simple answer to why you don't see the things you ask about.

Reservations are separate from the app which is where you will create your tickets (QR code).

I'll post another reply with some advice from the experienced travellers in the community. 

 

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 ticket in addition to the fee for the seat reservation.

 Activation of pass

During the activation process, when you choose the start day of the validity of the pass, the first day of the validity period is automatically made a travel day, even if you don't enter a journey, the advice is therefore not to activate the pass before the first travel day as you only can deactivate the pass before 00.00 on the day the validity starts. If your travel plans change in the last moment you will loose travel days if you have activated the pass in advance.

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, 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.

And-if you had taken the few mins to just read country info/ESpana-REServaciones-click on help on top-you would have realised it was all in vain-you wasted more time as this reading-as in ESpana its in practice only possible at counter in an estacion-and this is 1 reason why this country is by far #1 in being most pass-unfriendly. Still every day 100s of people come along here and complain about the same-hence this helpful piece of anna and another long paper by seewulf.

Thanks to you all. It’s a shame that some of these issues aren’t better publicised. I think I will just have to take the risk in Spain and hope there are trains I can reserve once I get there!

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