Hey everyone, I am very new to this but I wanted to go travelling starting monday for 4 weeks. I havent bought my pass yet but I wanted to get the eurostar on monday, starting from liverpool to paris. I wanted to stay a few days before heading to spain and so on. However, I have realised I should have booked the eurostar sooner. Should I book my interrail ticket and then look to see if there are seat reservations I can make? I am very confused about how to make these reservations and to see if there is availabilty on the eurostar, please help! thanks in advance :)
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It is wise of you to check the availability of the Eurostar before buying your Interrail pass.
There is a limited number of pass holder seats on the Eurostar and on popular departures and during high season those sell out weeks, and sometimes months in advance.
The best place to see the availability of passholder seats on the Eurostar is
https://www.b-europe.com/EN/Booking/Pass#TravelWish
Press "later trains" and eventually you will find the next available connection.
If you have a mobile pass you need to generate a Pass Cover Number in order to make the reservation at b-europe. You do that here in the PCN generator:
https://community.eurail.com/news-and-announcements-39/pass-cover-number-generator-is-live-5653
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.
Frankly: think again. Both FR and even more ESpana are the most difficult countries to use this pass-due to big need te REServe and though its not that bad as on €* it is bad for many in hi-season summer, now. Plus that 1/8 is the next major start of hols over there=the masses go travel by the millions.
You can use a pas like this and often at the whim of the moment in the quiet seasons, myself as a pensioner do that. But now, also with big staff shortages anywhere in transport, with strikes threats here&there and the post-covid wish of many to go now-not the best of times.
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