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Greetings,

Newbie here. Well, not really - I’m 76 so not quite so new.

My wife and I will be traveling to Europe from the US. and the trip starts in one week. From the Eurail website, I have purchased two Global passes (15 days in two months), and several seat reservations where called for. My questions pertains to use of the Rail Planner app.

  1. Is it generally a good idea to have both passes on one phone, or for each of us to have our own pass on our personal phone?
  2. If you are not making the seat reservations on the app, can you move previously purchased reservations over into the app? Or is it better just to keep paper reservations and use those when boarding?  Thanks in advance! 

1. It's better if each has their own pass on their phone. Otherwise you can't travel separately + if the phone gets stolen or doesn't work (hopefully not !), that would cause some issues. Fortunately you can now easily move the pass to another phone while travelling but still.

2. Seat reservations and the app are completely separate. You cannot make them through the app (or add them).

Add each train you'd like to the app before boarding : whether it requires seat reservations. This can be done at any time and gives you a QR-code -> your ticket for the ride.

Now on some trains you need to add mandatory seat reservations. Whenever asked show both the app (pass/ticket) and the PDF/printed sheet (seat reservation).

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.

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