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Greetings,

My friend and I will be travelling to Europe at the end of September from North America. I want to get a Mobile Pass on my phone but I don’t want to inadvertently activate it too soon since there are warnings about not being able to transfer between devices. I am trying to figure out how I should go about doing this. My idea is to bring a spare cell phone and buy a SIM card once I land and then purchase the Eurail Mobile Pass on that and activate it on that phone as opposed to bringing my regular cell phone and swapping SIM cards. Does anyone have advice on this? I am also wondering if I can buy the Eurail Pass on my cell phone in North America but not activate it until I get to Europe on the spare cell phone.

You can buy the pass from any device: your phone, a computer, etc. That doesn’t link the pass to a device. After the purchase, you'll receive an email with a pass number (the number is also visible in your Eurail account). Only after entering that pass number into the app, it will be linked to a device:

https://www.eurail.com/en/eurail-passes/eurail-mobile-pass/getting-started

The pass will not be linked to a SIM card but to the device itself (IMEI number I suppose, or maybe device ID).

There is no need to buy the mobile pass a long time in advance. The only reason to buy it in advance would be a temporary promotional offer. These occur a few times a year, usually with a 10 or 15% discount.

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 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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