Hello,
I'm thinking I want to take a train from Paris to Milan to Florence to Rome and then perhaps fly from Rome back to Paris in October. Does this makes sense in general financially if I use high speed trains vs air? Also, is there a good app for booking train travel? How far in advance should I book the travel? Thank you all.
An excellent resource to figure out trains in Europe is the "Man in Seat 61" website.
In your particular case, you have a few choices:
And in each case, you can use the respective train company's app or website. Bookings for the Paris-Milan train open about 4 months ahead, and I am not sure of the current booking windows in Italy (but it's probably either 3 or 4 months). The earlier you book, the cheaper, and cheapest tickets for Paris-Milan definitely cost less than airfare.
We used the ‘Trainline’ phone and iPad app in Italy, Spain and France last October and it worked perfectly. We had no issues whatsoever. We did have it on both iPhones as a fail safe.
Trainline.eu is the one we use. It is EASY to use, it makes it easy to compare prices of alternatives, it is easy to load the tickets into a file on your phone. In our experience it isn't more expensive than SNCF which has a terrible web site.9
