I make no secret that I am a senior who only recently found Interrail. After a lifetime of travelling for both leisure and pleasure by air/road and cruising I am now a convert to using Interrail to create land cruises.
Nor do I apologise for raising this conversation subject to a community that in general is phenomenally supportive and made my first Interrail trips a pleasure.
I enjoy adding contributions to the community from the perspective of a “Hybrid” user i.e. one who sees real pleasure from blending air and rail elements in my travels, not least because I live in the UK and ferries are not my thing.
Rail via LNER and Eurostar is OK but that always starts me in Belgium or France and costs in time, reservations and hotels. A cheap flight to Sicily or Poland etc allows me a much more satisfying experience than UK/France/Italy out and return by a similar routing,and allows me to extend my budget.
I, along with one other member, are being routinely attacked as “frequent flyers” or similar for suggesting fly/rail as an option, stating this is a community for rail users and flying has no place on it.
So why is it accepted that Eurailers will fly thousands of miles before starting their rail adventure but Europeans with difficult direct access to nearby countries are wrong to use flights?
At no time have I said anything against using trains as the heart of your journeys, just the opposite. I accept I am not a hard-core train buff who has backpack and sleeps on train, but would have loved to be one in my long passed 20s.
I, like many new generation Interrailers, do enjoy this experience of land-cruising in hotels and many need guidance on the transition, e.g. not necessarily a complex calculation of saving a few euros by working out lots of fare combinations against the daily rate of a pass
I prefer to think that all your tickets for your holiday (My pass) will cost £x plus reservations and this allows me a lot of flexibility on which trains I eventually travel on. I honestly don’t care about saving a few euros if I pre-purchase fixed tickets and a Global pass is always (in Western Europe) cheaper than paying fully flexible prices.
(A slight aside a 4 day pass used 2 days in the UK for day trips Leeds to London or Edinburgh (Not in the spirit of IR I know) is cheaper than just one of those journeys on flexible fares, especially in first class on morning or evening trains).
Surely there is a place on this community for all users including potential Hybrid Interrailers.