Eurorail Help PLEASE!!!!

Book Paris-Amsterdam and Brussels-Paris at www.thalys.com. Choose English as your language and France as your country for ticket retrieval. Choose paper ticket. For your dates you can still get an Optiway fare for Paris-Amsterdam and a Smoove fare for Brussels-Paris. Act quickly. Those discount fares will not last long.

For Amsterdam-Brussels IC trains are cheaper than Thalys trains and are nearly as fast. There is no discount for advance purchase so buy your tickets in Amsterdam. There is open seating and no reservations are possible so you can make a last-minute decision on which train you wish to take.

Popular night trains can sell out weeks in advance. Don't wait until you are in Paris or Rome to book those tickets. What kind of sleeping accommodations do you want on the Paris-Venice and the Rome-Paris night trains? If you're willing to share a four-bunk couchette with strangers, you can get discount fares. If you want a two-bed sleeper, you'll pay a lot more. If you can handle basic French, you can book both trains at www.voyages-sncf.com. However, new train timetables will go into effect on 14 December. Since they haven't been loaded yet, not all fare options are listed. If you want more help, just ask.

Buy your Venice-Rome tickets at a station as soon as you arrive in Rome. Ask for Amica fares (20% discount). If any of the allotted number of seats are still available, you can get Amica fares up to midnight of the day before departure.

Flying Paris-Venice and Rome-Paris on a budget airline will probably cost less than taking the train. (However, with night trains you save the cost of a night in a hotel.) See these budget airline search engines: www.flylc.com, www.whichbudget.com, and www.skyscanner.net. If you can get a good fare on another airline, avoid Ryanair. While their fares can be great, they use Beauvais which is a LONG way from Paris and Treviso is much farther from Venice than is Marco Polo.

What people generally do in your situation is use a train website, like Deutsche Bahn
http://www.bahn.de/international/view/en/index.shtml

to plug in all their train trips and add up the cost. Then, compare that to the cost of a pass. Eurail passes often aren't a good deal for people over 26 but there are multiple country passes that might be. Rick talks about this in his general Europe guide. So you have to do the legwork--no one can tell you yes or no without doing the research.

I agree that you should also look into flying between cities like Paris and Venice, especially on the budget airlines like Ryan Air and Easy Jet--otherwise, that's an awful lot of time on a train for a 2 week trip, and overnight sleeper trains aren't cheap.

Also, do you realize that this website has pages (under "railpasses") devoted to helping people figure out which, if any, railpass is best for them?

Eric,

While it can take a while to figure out whether to buy a pass or point to point tickets, the savings can be considerable. My wife and I saved closed to $500 by purchasing point to point versus railpass for our month in Europe this summer. Keep in mind too, that even with a pass, you'll have to pay additional fees for some legs for reservations. Spending the time now doing the research will also make it a bit easier when you get to Europe and try figuring things out for the first time. Good luck!

In my previous post I guess I should have said directly that point-to-point tickets will be cheaper than a railpass, particularly if one can get advance discount fares. Apparently, even with the references I made to where to book and what discount fares are still available, it wasn't clear that I've already done most of Eric's research for him.

Some people don't read before they post, Tim. :)

Tim/Nancy-I think it was clear in your post that point to point was the way to go, I was just reiterating the points you had made above and encouraging Eric to explore that route instead of a railpass.

Jed