Eurail Train Reservations?!

It's so easy to buy the railpass and not realize that there are extra supplements to be paid on top of what the Eurail pass basically covers. The most costly are supplemental fees for night trains. All require mandatory reservations and I think that all will require the additional supplemental fees.

CLICK HERE to see information from the RS website on night train fees. They do vary.

A couple of notes: 1) make your night train reservations and soon as you can as, unlike day trains, they do fill up. 2) Some country train systems limit the seats available for railpass holders. 3) In Italy and other countries, you will pay additional seat reservation fees on the faster trains. For example, if you ride the Eurostar in Italy, you will pay an additional 20Euro for the seat reservation. This is often greater than 1/2 the price of a normal P2P ticket which includes the seat reservation.

Thanks for the info! Another questions though, is there a way to request just a regular seat on a night train and not pay any extra for a couchette or a bed. All i need is to get to the destination, sitting in a seat overnight is not a problem if it's cheaper...

Jake, I believe that this is easy to do as there should be non-sleeper carriages. However, you open yourself up to luggage theft and other risks as you sleep (and you most likely will). The couchettes and sleepers lock from the inside. You might be able to mitigate this with a lock cable on your luggage (which normally can be placed on racks just over your head). Or, I have snoozed on day trains with my smaller day pack under my legs. That has worked well.

How do I go about in reserving these non-couchette, standard night seats? Is there a option on railpass.com??

Jake....you can make reservations at RailEurope.com (after you enter your start and destination cities, check the little box that says "Click this box if you have a railpass." On the numbers that come up, look for the lowest price...they're probably the seats....click on "details" for a description. Then book them there. These will include the necessary reservations on any train that requires them.

--raileurope.com (in New York) is way overpriced! You can save a ton of money by purchasing direct on the rail site of the country(s) in question. SNCF.com is excellent and you can print your own tickets! Bon voyage!

Unfortunately, Bill, you can't purchase just reservations at SNCF.com . You can telephone some of the national rail websites and book reservations only...but depending on the runs, purchasing reservations only at RailEurope is probably the best way to go.

My point about RE was that a P2P ticket (with) reservation included may cost far less on a european rail site than a reservation (only) on raileurope.com. Raileurope ripped me off once; They won't do it again!

We used a Global railpass a few years ago when we spent a month travelling. We found a few night trains that only cost about €20/bed but others were far too expensive so we slept in seats. Those reservations ran about €3-5. We didn't make the reservations from the US, we just waited until we arrived in Barcelona for example, got the reservation to Paris at the station, and then we were set for our train 3 days later or whatever.

We did this in Sevilla, Barcelona, Paris, and Vienna I believe and never had a problem getting seats. We stashed our bags under our seats and never had problems with anything being stolen, although it's always a possibility.

Bill...that's true some times....but the problem is Jake already has a railpass :(

Wow! Thanks for all the help! I actually already had my Eurail global pass, so I decided to just buy the overnight reservations from raileurope.com. Thanks again for all the help!