I am looking to book a journey from Prague to Hallstatt on Jan 5 and while the Eurail site shows that reservations are not required, for my anxious wife’s peace of mind I would like to try to reserve a seat wherever possible for our holiday.
I have tried booking via eurail.com, oebb.at and cd.cz and selected various settings with either the Eurail pass discount or seat-only options and I have attempted to change the journey simply from Prague to Linz to try to reserve that seat. On all of the sites I haven’t been able to reserve seats so I was wondering whether the allocation for pass holders has been exhausted or if I am doing something wrong.
I can see via the cd.cz site that there are still seats available to reserve, but when doing so I get the message “The booking period for this reservation has not yet begun or has already expired.”.
The oebb.at site just says “No ticket required” and I don’t get the option to add on the Seat Reservation and eurail.com gives the generic “unavailable” message.
Hopefully I am just misunderstanding the system, I would rather not show up in hopes that we can find a seat, especially if the seat map that I saw shows only a couple of 1st class compartments remaining.
Any help is greatly appreciated.