Should I get a Eurail Pass for my specific itinerary ?

ryan,

What is the total duration of your trip?

For the trips you mentioned, I'd suggest using a combination of rail and budget airlines. A few suggestions.....

• Lisbon to Madrid - have a look at EasyJet, which currently has flights listed in September for about €44.99 PP (plus a few fees of course). You could also look at Vueling although I believe they include a layover in Barcelona (I prefer direct flights whenever possible).
• Madrid to Barcelona - use the AVE high speed train, which travels at up to 300 kmH. If you pre-book you may be able to get inexpensive tickets.
• Barcelona to Nice - again, look at EasyJet which has flights currently priced at €29.99 PP.
• Nice to Paris - you could again travel by budget air, but I'd suggest travel via TGV high speed train. The travel time will likely be about the same, when all is considered.
• Paris to London - I'd suggest the EuroStar train. If you pre-book tickets, you can save lots, but the tickets are usually non-refundable and non-changeable, so choose carefully! You may find it helpful to have a look at the excellent Man In Seat 61 website, which has the answers to ALL your questions, including whether to buy a Railpass.
• England to Amsterdam - do you mean London or some other part of England? It's difficult to offer suggestions without specific information.
• Amsterdam to Munich - that trip will be about 7.5 hours by train, with one or two changes. That's right at my "tipping point" for using a budget flight, but I'd have to check which carriers offer flights on that route. I'd probably still use the train, rather than go through all the usual airport hassles. You can use the Bahn.de website to research all your rail journeys.
• Munich to Italy - difficult to offer suggestions without knowing which cities you're going to in Italy.
• Italy to Greece - I'd suggest a budget flight (EasyJet) from Rome to Athens. It's a very pleasant and relatively short flight.

For suggestions on the best way to get around Greece, you might find it helpful to have a look at the excellent Greece Travel website.

When using budget airlines, it's important to book early as they often use a sliding scale with prices increasing as the flight fills. Also, pay special attention to the "Terms & Conditions" of whichever airlines you use, especially concerning luggage weights. For example, EasyJet only allows ONE carry-on item per passenger of the approved size, and they're usually quite inflexible on that point.

Ryan, in reality, you are not on the trains in any one country enough to even get close to cost justifying a Eurail pass. Unfortunately, the alternative is to work on 3-4 different country train websites and a couple of budget airlines websites to get all of your tickets. Also, your dates have to be well locked in before you buy the tickets. A couple of thoughts.

1) As Ken describes, you have the nice option of budget plane flights between a couple of your locations. No need for the Eurail pass.

2)The Eurail pass is not accepted in England nor can you use it online to buy Eurostar tickets. The Eurostar does have a "passholder" fare but you must buy it at the station or call the Eurostar booking center at +44 (0) 1233 617 575
3) Most countries will charge a supplemental fee on top of your rail pass to ride their nicer trains. In Spain, it's 10Euro for 2nd class on the AVE train. 23.50Euro for 1st class. About 15.20Euro to get to Marseille on your way to Nice on the TGV from Barcelona.

4) For your trip from Nice to Paris, you can get very nice PREM fare for well under 100Euro if you can purchase 90 days in advance and are willing to accept non-refundable tickets. Or, it's a short flight on EasyJet. Note also that SNCF (French train system) limits their seats on the TGV to Eurail passholders. When seats are gone, you pay full fare unless you are willing to wait for a later train that has available seats for passholders.

5) Again, no Eurail pass on the Eurostar. The Eurail pass is not accepted in England.

6) For England to Amsterdam, you most likely will route back through France. Most likely, you will be on the Thalys train from France to Amsterdam. The Thalys train has some of the highest supplemental fees for Eurail passholders in Europe. Expect a 39Euro supplemental fee to ride from Paris to Amsterdam. Thalys also limits their seats to passholders.

We paid 40 euros for Paris to nice two summers ago on iDTGV website. First class! We did book months in advance.
Spontaneity has a price, and even with a pass you have to make reservations and spent on fees.

The pass that would cover the majority of your trip would be a Eurail global pass, for instance covering the 10 longest train rides within 2 months for $825 per person in 1st class or $630 in 2nd class if you're all under age 26. Seat reservations add about $20 per leg in Spain, France, and Italy, and the Lisbon-Madrid train service is only by overnight train, with sleeper fee.
If you find some attractive flights on the longer routes (see www.skyscanner.com), then a pass becomes less useful.

I think you have time to refine the plan a bit before you start buying tickets. You have no small towns on the list, and those will give you a much different experience and a break from the big-city traffic/metros/etc. I also wonder whether these priorities are all equal, or if you added Nice, for instance, because it looked like it was on the way to Paris (it's not really). If you decided to skip Nice, you could fly Barcelona-London, then later train London-Paris-Amsterdam. There are lots of options.

You might also consider one of our paid consulting appointments to help flesh out an itinerary.

Thank you so much for all of your help everyone ! There is a lot of great information to build off of from here.

Ken, to answer your questions, the trip will be around 2 months long and yes we will be in London.

For our trip, we have a basic idea of how many days we want to stay in each location, but other than Oktoberfest, we don't want to have to commit to anything to far in advance. It sounds like this may become an issue for certain tickets we may have to book in advance. However I am pretty convinced that the Eurail pass is not the way to go.

My friends and I are going to further look into all of this information and will most likely have some more questions lol.

Once again, Thank you Ken, Larry, Pat and Laura.

ryan,

You're very welcome! I asked about the duration of your trip as I wanted to determine if you'd be exceeding the 90-day Schengen Visa limit.

Using the "spontaneous approach" will probably not work well if using budget airlines, as the prices will be higher for short-notice bookings and especially if you're travelling with a small group, you may not be able to get seats for everyone. I can't recall any flights I've made in Europe where the plane wasn't completely full.

A similar situation applies when pre-booking "premium" trains, many of which have compulsory reservations. For example, in Italy if you book too late you probably won't be able to get the "Super Economy or Economy" tickets, and will have to pay "Base Fare" (which is what you'll be paying for buying tickets on the day of travel). If you want spontaneity, you'll have to get used to paying the higher fares.

Good luck with your planning!