I last used an Interrail 30 years ago as a young man, I’d love to go again with my son, but the awful ‘reservations’ problems that I’ve been learning about on almost all trains in France and Spain (also elsewhere) is making me think twice!!
I really don’t mind paying E10 for a reservation on a high speed French train or E8 for a Spanish train, but the huge bureaucracy involved just to make a reservation seems ridiculous, in 2022! Phone calls, ticket offices, calling German railways, Belgian railway website, cover numbers, what the hell is going on! Without reservations you can’t easily plan - OK if you’re a student with 3 months to spare, not so good if you’ve only got 7-10 days.
However, I do understand that Interrail Management can’t control the policies of national railways. So the main subject of this post is: are the Interrail Management aware that there are 2 simple things they could do to make their customers’ lives much, much easier? Yes - their customers!
- Update the app to allow E20 French reservations. It allows E10 reservations, why on earth is it impossible to offer E20 ones? Surely this is easily fixable. Forcing customers to (apparently) spend half an hour on the international phone to SNCF just to reserve an E20 seat is crazy.
- Provide a Cover Number with all digital passes. It seems this Cover Number is critical to make reservations - apparently it can be provided ‘on request’ with a substantial delay - so why isn’t it just provided automatically for every customer when they buy their pass? If Interrail promote digital passes, surely they have to provide the codes to make it easy to use?!
Does anyone on these forums have contacts with the Interrail staff, to ask if these things are being tackled?