You should never activate the pass and start the validity before your first travel day. There is no reason to do that unless you have bought a youth pass and need to activate the pass before you turn 28 or if you have a children's pass for a child that will turn 12.

If you start the validity of the pass on the 1st of November and then also have activated a travel day for the 10th of November,  then the pass will show that 1 travel day is used.

To get better answers, please post a screenshot with the personal details removed. 

If your first day of travel is 10 November, then it is best to activate your pass to start on 10 November.

If it’s a month pass, it will be valid until 9 December.

If you’ve accidentally activated your pass too early, you can deactivate it up until midnight the day before.

I do not know who rated this topic as ‘solved’ because it is not.

And who rated an answer as ‘best answer ‘ because it is not.

Many community members keep saying “ there is no need” : No there is not. But the way it works it is an obligation, not a choice.

And always the same phrase: ‘ if you accidentally….’.

The point is: it seems that a travel day is taken out off your account before you start travelling if you activate your pass in advance. That should not happen.

Must say that the service team was very fast and helpful in addressing this problem.

Hi Laika,

I agree with you that a lot of the answers to this sort of question start off by telling people that they absolutely, definitely, 100% should not press the button until the day they intend to travel, when the button/function should have no bearing at all on anything until a traveler has a specific train on a specific day entered.

We can see from the sheer number of people with this sort of question that this causes confusion to loads of first timers.  This just doesn’t need to be the case and should be addressed by the providers.

What experienced users may not consider or remember is that a first timer really, really does not want to find out on the day that their travel begins that they cannot activate their pass because something they didn’t know about has cropped up . . most people will want to be prepared in advance, activate their pass, put a few trains in the planner, even if it is only a few days in advance.  This concept of avoiding doing this until the last possible minute just doesn’t sit well with those who like to be prepared.

I had this earlier this year when I was trying to organise my trip.  I had hotels, other connections, activities in cities, everything for a big trip and then I found that there was something quirky with my pass.  I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it took a couple of days to sort out and if I had discovered that on day 1 I would have been a very sad traveler sitting in a ferry port in Dublin while my train from Holyhead left, and my Eurostar arrived in Brussels that evening.

It should absolutely be possible to set things up in advance without having to worry where a missing day has gone, or whether you inadvertently use up precious travel days without realising it.

Why, yes, I feel strongly about this . . .

A lot of the difficulties and confusion with using the app stem from the fact that it tries to replicate the process of using a paper pass - and that doesn’t always translate well to the way people expect an app to work.

If you buy a ‘4 days in one month’ paper pass, then you have to fill in the dates that you will travel in the four boxes. Sure, you can do that ahead of time if you like, but then if plans change and you’ve already written the date in ink ... you’re going to have to go to some lengths to reverse that. And if the date has already passed, then you’ve already ‘used’ that day - even if you didn’t use it.

In fact, reverting to paper passes would solve a great deal of the questions people have! In my opinion, the app could do with a complete ground-up redesign, as a genuine mobile product.

The advice given here to wait until the day of travel is just that - advice borne out by collective years of experience from fellow travellers. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to take it. But please don’t criticise people who volunteer their time trying to help others find their way around an imperfect product.

By all means suggest changes to Eurail. I doubt posts here in the forums will have much effect, but you can send them feedback directly.

You can always activate the pass to check that everything works before your travel and then deactivate the pass.

The problem arises if the pass is activated at 00.00 on the first day of the validity, and you then for some reason can't travel. The the validity has started and the pass can't be deactivated.

@ralderton I think we agree on a couple of the points - including that the app is too tied to the old paper process and needs an overhaul and a redesign to be more like an app and less like a paper ticket.  I didn’t intend to criticise people (like you and me) who provide advice or saying the advice was wrong, I was just saying that there are a number of avoidable problems like this that come up over and over on these forums and which cause genuine problems and concern for travelers.  People can continue to provide good advice here, but that’s not going to help the future travelers who don’t know the forum exists and just expect an electronic ticket to behave the way an electronic ticket should behave.

Thank you Zagmund for your very good picture of first time users and ralderton for your comments on the design process.

Lets hope the developers pick it up.