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Hi, 

Currently completing last minute details for a month long trip through 5 countries. I’ve been able to find perfect times for all of my trains and have added them to my journey. I’m running into an issue where all of my travel days add up to 12 travel days. This leaves me short 2 days on the 10 day pass but with 3 excess days I wouldn't be able to use. I was curious if I’m able to purchase just single days or if it has to be a pass? Any advice? 
Also, 8/12 of my travel days require seat reservations (one requiring global pass). Is the pass worth it or do you think I’ll end up paying extra?

 

Best, 

Rachel 

Hi it is not possible to add days, except by customer service in case of delayes or technical problems.

But you can buy normal tickets for the cheepest ride (it can be also in the middle of the journey).

There is no possibility to add extra travel days. 

What you can do is to buy normal tickets for those days where you travel in countries with cheap tickets or where you travel a short way.

You always have to pay for seat reservations on trains with mandatory reservations but on most routes there are trains without reservations. Those trains just take longer time. 

If you share your travel plan here you can get advice on how to travel without that many reservations.

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, 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.

HInt: countries where railfares still tend to be fairly cheap: East and then South EUR.

Most often trips OVER border cost far more as only inland.

In some countries you may even qualify for youth/junior or senior discounts on normal tickets.

OR-EUR also has scores of long buslines-a bit like Greyhound-but all prebooked and often overnite for long trips- FLIXbus (which bought the Grhd some time ago) and BlaBla-car are widest-these may also servce you to do a disounted trip.

Re your question on whether it is worth it:

In simple cash terms you could find the price of each of your journeys if you buy online and total them up.

However that is fraught when compared to a pass because the best prices are usually non refundable and for fixed trains. Fully refundable and flexible fares are notoriously expensive.

if you miss a planned train for any reason you may get a free transfer (after visiting ticket office) but the risk is you have to buy another ticket at full price.

Because your pass is not linked to specific trains, just all trains on a travel day, you simply find an alternative train routing and add it to your travel day with maximum cost of a new reservation (if your existing one isn’t changed FOC.

Remember a reservation is totally separate to your pass so changing your journey” in travel” is no problem to your pass. 

Only you can calculate whether the extra cost of a 15 day in 2 months pass (about 70 euro) is better than paying local fares for 2 days , but the extra days could be used as side excursions or even for a long weekend break somewhere.

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