Skip to main content

Hi! I’m travelling to Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Nice, Milan, Rome, Italy, Bern, and Frankfurt. I have 2 questions.
 

  1.  Do I really need to print out seat reservations or tickets for any of these cities? I leave tomorrow and plan to kind of book as I go, I find it so dumb to print things out when I have a mobile global pass 
  2. Going from Paris-Barcelona I need a seat reservation, but it says it’ll be mailed by post… but I’m staying in airbnbs etc and don’t know if I’ll get it in time. How do I work around this?? 

any help is greatly appreciated thanks  

 

Booking reservations as you go can either be done at ticket offices, who will give you a printout anyway, or via sites that will send e tickets in pdf format which can be shown alongside your mobile pass, to which you have of course added the relevant train to your travel day. Your pass generates a QR code, which  is your ticket for all trains you add to your pass (one QR code covers all trains taken and added to the pass from your trip in that travel day.

Remember that your pass is separate from your reservation so both are needed on trains with mandatory reservations.

If you are travelling tomorrow then any reservation requiring a print out to be sent by snail mail will never reach you in time and you will need to use an alternative method. Paris to Barcelona is a regular problem on this community and has been answered many times so a quick search will show you the options there.

 


It is possible to get Paris - Barcelona via email, by calling SNCF or CFL:

 


Booking reservations as you go can either be done at ticket offices, who will give you a printout anyway, or via sites that will send e tickets in pdf format which can be shown alongside your mobile pass, to which you have of course added the relevant train to your travel day. Your pass generates a QR code, which  is your ticket for all trains you add to your pass (one QR code covers all trains taken and added to the pass from your trip in that travel day.

Remember that your pass is separate from your reservation so both are needed on trains with mandatory reservations.

If you are travelling tomorrow then any reservation requiring a print out to be sent by snail mail will never reach you in time and you will need to use an alternative method. Paris to Barcelona is a regular problem on this community and has been answered many times so a quick search will show you the options there.

 

Thank you! Any chance you know if it’s more expensive at ticket offices? Also ticket offices are always in the main train stations right? 
 

sorry if these are silly questions, I appreciate your help!!


Reservations that are supplied digitally, so e-mailed or presented on a website/app account, can be either printed or shown on phone.

The one exception to this seems to be some of the night trains/couchette/sleeper who still want print-outs. I can imagine they are by now losing that battle as they will be encountering so many with just phones.

 

Paris - Barcelona has high reservation fees and very low quotas for passholders, yes you can book these at French station ticket offices but only if there are passholder spaces still available which I wouldn’t be too optomistic about at short notice.

I am not explaining the alternative to the direct Paris - Barcelona again, read my last post on this thread

 


Reply