trouble booking AVE reservations Lyon-Barcelona Dec 27th

Renfe should not have a limited pass holder quota but the international AVEs have been showing exactly that for a number of months now, including on Happyrail, Rail Europe and interrail.eu. The AVE Lyon-Barcelona on 27/12 still has many free seats in 2nd class but indeed only 1 can be booked with a pass.

You could ask Rail Europe support what the problem is and when they think this will be solved. If you do, then please let us know what they say.

Thanks for the quick and helpful reply! It’s good to hear that these trains should not have a limited amount of Interrail seats.

I’ve contacted Rail Europe support and will update this thread once I hear back from them.

Update: I just heard back from Rail Europe. They confirmed there only seems to be one Interrail ticket left for this service on their booking platform, even though the train still seems to be almost entirely empty when I try to book a standard full-fare ticket.

They also claim there are only limited Interrail allocations on these services. From @rvdborgt’s reply it sounds like this should not be the case. This page on the Interrail website does not seem to make any definite statements either way. Where could I find out more about this?

Renfe should be the ultimate source for this information. You could contact their customer service.

​@Eurail Community Moderator Do you have any more information about this? I suppose Eurail has a contact person at Renfe.

Okay, I’ve sent in this question via the Renfe contact form. RailEurope got back to me again with a general reply stating the availability of passholder reservations is dictated by the operators and they cannot influence that, which makes sense. However, it also does not seem like they know if this is expected behavior for the Ave trains or not. I’d be very happy to hear from other sources, too.

For the record, from a quick count on the HappyRail seat map, it looks like there’s currently a total of 161 bookable seats and 102 occupied seats in the five second-class carriages of this train.

Hi Everyone!

We’re aware of the current situation regarding passholder quotas on international AVE trains and are already in contact with RENFE to get more clarity on this.

Thanks for your patience!

Camilo

Hi ​@Eurail Community Moderator , thanks for picking this up! Would you be able to give an update of the current situation?

From what I can see, no further second-class Interrail reservations have been released for this train. Do you think this is likely to change? If not, since my travel dates are getting close, I would probably have to buy a reservation for the (unfortunately slower and more expensive) inOUI service from Valence to Barcelona instead.

Either way, thank you for your time!

You can book the TGV from Valence for peace in mind. Do that on Rail Europe. These TGV reservations are fully refundable until 30 minutes after (!) departure and Rail Europe makes it really easy to cancel them if you manage to get additional seats on the AVE later.

Perfect, thanks!

Hi ​@sdk120347, sorry for the wait! Since there hasn’t been any update on new second-class Interrail reservations for this train, it’s best to go ahead and book a reservation for the TGV instead.