Hi Everyone,
I attempted to reserve seats for January 2023 however all routes are showing as the timetable has not been released. However, when I go directly to the rail company websites such as OBB, they are available to purchase on there.
Does anyone know why this is?
I wanted to reserve a seat on an overnight train and am a bit worried if it’s available on the direct website that it will sell out.
It is always best to make the reservation with the railway company running the train. Please read more about this below.
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 and create the ticket (QR code), 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.
You can reserve directly via ÖBB, choosing for one way tickets and adding Interrail as Discount. So you get a reservation (it starts from 14€ in the seat carriage). I know that the same day of the release of the new timetable some Nightjets Amsterdam-Austria got full booked for holidays.
I am on the OBB website now, would you happen to know how to activate the eurail discount?
Here a link with a tutorial how it works:
Would you happen to know why?
It is not available because this train is coming from Budapest and they didn’t open the sale yet.
You could check for the 21.27 train. That one is available already and will arrive at the same time (and in January maybe more convenient to board the train at 21.27 instead of 23.27). The train is standing two hours in Salzburg until the Budapest portion arrives and then they will arrive together at 8.20 in Zürich next day.
The 23.27 EN (which originates east of Vienna and is run in conjunction with other operators) is showing unavailable for all inquiries, it is probably too early for this to be released.
The 21.27 NJ (both departures get combined overnight with the same arrival into Zurich) is available for booking now for passholders, seats for €14, shared couchettes from €34 and solo sleepers for €124 or larger en-suite for €144.
Did you choose reduction “Interrail / Eurail - Globalpass”?
I get then prices shown:
Check out the link that
So it will be 56, 136 or 296 euro for the 4 of you (depending on what class you book)
Great! 
Yeah, with “seat only” it doesn’t work unfortunately.
Have a good trip!
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