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Train seat reservations

Is it possible to acquire train seat reservations while in Austria when we already purchased a rail pass while still in the US?

Posted by
5362 posts

Why would you purchase a rail pass for Austria when point to point tickets are so affordable? My suggestion is to contact the company where you purchased your pass as that is a part of what you are paying all that $$ for - their advice.

Posted by
1516 posts

You can easily get reservations at the station, but I would probably use the ÖBB app for that. Reservations are optional however, so you can use your rail pass the way it is intended to be used: for flexible, ad hoc, travel.

Posted by
7181 posts

Not speaking about Austria specifically, but you do not want to buy seat reservations "over there", because there may be long, slow-moving lines for a limited number of ticket windows in the station (as well as possible "sell-outs" in high season.) You didn't make clear if your trips require a seat reservation, or whether you want to take a chance on a reservation-optional trip.

Regarding point-to-point tickets, although reservations are not that expensive, if you know your travel times, you could have probably bought advance-discount point-to-point tickets, maybe further in advance of travel than you have available now. You should find ways to expose various fares on that OBB site linked in another post. You should learn to use the site anyway, in case of (speculative ... ) disruptions during your vacation.

Posted by
1516 posts

One thing people often forget is that you do not have to be in A to buy a ticket or reservation from A. Any station that linked to the ticketing/reservation system can do that. So you can do your reservations when the opportunity presents itself, eg. you arrive by train in a city and notice that the ticket office is not very busy, so you go and quickly book your next sectors there...

The point of a pass is flexibility. The moment that you are looking for ways of reserving tickets before your flight to Europe you actually should not have bought the pass in the first place...

Posted by
7 posts

Thank you for all of the replies. They have been very helpful! The type of pass my family purchased for our two months in Europe is the Eurail Global Pass/Flexi Pass. This allowed us to purchase the exact number of trips we needed, while also allowing flexibility as to the days/times of day we will make those trips, since we do not know all of those times in advance. But we couldn’t figure out, on that site, how to purchase seat reservations now that we are here in Europe. The link to the OBB site is just what we needed! Thank you! And thank you for all of the other information as well!

Posted by
1516 posts

One more tip: I do not know what other countries you are planning on visiting, but a ticket office in Austria can reserve seats on Italian and German trains for you as well. And a ticket office in Italy should be able to reserve train in Austria. and so on.