Can't find ticket La Spezia - Milano Centrale

The rail planner app doesn't show availability.

www.trenitalia.com also shows a lot of fully booked trains, although there still some trains with availability. There are also many options to travel by regional train, reservation-free, not much slower than the options with reservations. Choose "Regional trains” to get an overview of those.

I’ve just booked via Trentalia site.  This is really disappointing as it appears i can’t use my eurail pass.

I'm not sure why you would book a normal ticket when you have a rail pass. Of course you can use it. I merely suggested to look at the options available on the Trenitalia website because that is the best timetable source for Italy, also showing availability. Booking pass reservations is not possible anymore on that website but there are other reservation possibilities, such as the ÖBB website.

On the other hand, La Spezia to Milan is not that far, so a travel day on your pass can actually be more expensive than a norma ticket.

The Intercity trains (with mandatory reservations) seems full yes but don't worry there are reservation-free regional trains where you just hop on and off as you want. No need to book anything for these trains (it's not possible anyway).

You look the schedule on bahn.de or trenitalia.com (filter regional trains) and then simply board.

Let me know if it's still not clear

Edit : an example would be

- R La Spezia Centrale 12:15 - Sestri Levante 13:19

- R Sestri Levante 13:28 - Genova P. Principe 14:46

- RE Genova P. Principe 15:46 - Milano Centrale 17:35

All reservation-free, nothing to book.

If the trains you are looking at are marked R, RE or RV (as those ones are) then these can not be booked out. These trains do not allow anyone to reserve seats, you just add them to your pass, board the train and take any free seat.

Looking further into this, all those unavailable trains look very odd, unless there is a particular event that day that has massively ramped up demand. No other Sunday between now and then has booked out trains like that, even this coming Sunday has plenty of availability. It could well be that Trenitalia hasn’t released those trains yet for some reason.

You always have the option to use the slower trains so you won’t be stranded, check closer to the date and if the fast trains have opened up you can always book a seat on one right up to the day of travel if you wish.

In Italy trains listed as Frecce… or InterCity require seat reservations and can sell out, these are the faster trains, as can be seen there are alternatives by taking the slower regional trains that do not take reservations.
 

If you use the option in the eurail app marked “No Seat Reservations” it will filter out the trains it has tagged as requiring reservations and show connections only using those that can be taken without any pre-booking.

The reason you have been advised to use the Trainitalia and Bahn apps over the Eurail is because of the different way they work.

Eurail app runs from a database stored on your phone that is downloaded only once every few weeks, it is done this way to be available on the app even without an internet connection although it does mean it is never going to be as accurate as the online planners from the railway companies who actually run the trains and constantly update their data.

It is not outrageously inaccurate, in my experience it has been accurate on at least 90% of the trains I have used, it is just that there is no way, particularly for someone unfamiliar with the railways, to tell when it is wrong.

What dates?

Trains fully booked out months in advance is certainly not usual across Europe.

There are a small number of predictable routes that fill up and there are always peaks of demand around general behaviour of locals in many places such as Friday afternoon/evenings from big cities as well as local holidays/events that seemingly see the entire population of some regions all flock to the exact same place at the same time but in general, particularly outside the peak July - Aug season it is not a problem finding reasonable connections to most places at short notice never mind 2 months in advance.

Like I said, it is rare enough it is inaccurate, often it will just be timings that are out and the inaccuracies often get corrected closer to travel as long as you update the app.

The vast majority of trains will be in the app, due to the differences in the way they work journeys involving multiple connections do not always show the same in different planners, if that happens the adding the individual train journeys in usually will get them to show.

If you just can’t get a train to show then there is a facility to manually add a train so you are never stuck even if the app fails to find a train.

To give you an example, my last trip involved approx 60 trains across 7 countries. Out of those, the app failed to show 3 trains, two of those are known to be an issue the other was a random omission. all 3 are trains you would have to go out of your way to use, the rest of the trains all showed in the app without problem. I added the missing ones through manual entry before boarding and had no issues.

Of those 60 odd trains, I can’t say exactly how many times the pass was checked but on only 2 or 3 occasions was it seriously inspected beyond the QR code being scanned or the main body of text looked at, only those 2 were bothered enough to scroll down to check their actual train was listed.

Gosh this is a lot to take in.  i can’t thank you enough.  I will look over this in these next few days and get my head around it all.  Again, many, many thanks. 

It may not be linked but the Alpini annual get together is happening that weekend in Udine (I know it is way beyond Venice) which has hundreds of thousands of visitors.https://www.ana.it/udine-2023/

We happened to inadvertently arrive in Bergamo many years ago on this weekend and tried to leave as thousands arrived on the last day by train - Trains were arriving every few minutes and it really was an awesome (if difficult) trying to get to our platform against the tide of  humans arriving without any gaps.

It does however show anybody heading fro the area around Trieste.Venice to be prepared for full trains in that area.

It is for both.