question about checking train prices

It has been repeated many, many times on this site that RailEurope is NOT a train company. It is a travel agency that sells train tickets primarily to North Am tourists. As such they don't show the cheapest price and mark up the price of these ticket substantially to cover marketing costs. For Italian tickets, Trenitalia is your best site for prices.

Hi Natalie
I found this link in another post and found the price for one of my trips (cheaper than what's listed on raileurope). You might want to take a look.

http://www.trainticket.com.au/

I also have the same question, I have looked at Trenitalia to get prices for train travel in August but the trips that I enter always say "no" under the buy option. I have tried to get a price for July assuming that August was too far away but it didn't seem to make a difference. Any other suggestions?

yeah thats my problem too, even if i dont want to buy them online. i just want to find out the prices for these routes so i can budget them!

For the most part, Trenitalia does not let you purchase tickets for the local regionale (R) trains. Thus, you see the NO in the Buy column. I do understand that all you want is pricing but if they don't sell you the ticket, you can't see the price.

What you can try on Trenitalia is a date within 5 days of the current date. You can often see the opportunity to purchase R train tickets this close into a travel date (but not always, however).

Still no luck, one of the trips I'm looking to take is from Salzburg (Austria) to Bolzano (Italy). I tried what was suggested but I couldn't get a price. I would like to get able to get a good idea as to what I can expect to spend on train travel. Any other ideas?

sarah, what ive been doing is if i cant find a price for a train on trenitalia, i check raileurope.com. it is often quite a bit higher than if you bought from trenitalia, but at least it gives you a kind of cap off price. kind of like at least youll know you probably wont pay more than that price, but from what ive seen its often 2-3x less on trenitalia for many trains. just a thought.

The place to begin is with a timetable search at bahn.de which has timetables for nearly all of Europe. Click on the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner for English. After you get summary timetables for Salzburg-Bolzano, click on "Details for all" to see the connecting points. Then go to the appropriate national rail sites to price legs within one country or between countries. On the Swiss Rail site I found a fare of €35.20 for Salzburg-Innsbruck. On the Trenitalia site I found a fare of €15.00 for Innsbruck-Bolzano.

One secret to getting good pricing is to break up the trip. For Sarah, I have PM'ed her on pricing the Salzburg/Innsbruck leg on www.bahn.de and the Innsbruck/Bolzano leg on www.trenitaliza.com. You often have to break up your trip to get pricing when you are traveling long distances between countries.

The best thing to do as mentioned above is check http://www.trenitalia.it/en/index.html. You can get an approx price there in Euros. Sometimes they are cheaper buying them at the train station from the automatic ticket booths. The train prices on rail Europe are really high.

I've been able to get pricing at the trenitalia website sometimes ..and sometimes not. When I can't get them, I click to get the site in Italian and then put in the Italian name rather than the
English one. I usually get the price which is in Euros in either case.

I've never been able to buy train tickets from trenitalia.com. I think you have to have a special account to buy on line. Ticket prices don't seem to vary much from day to day, so when checking prices, just choose today. Oh and also, i've never had a situation where a train is sold out. Oh and one more thing, I have travled 1st class and 2nd class, I don't see any difference between the two. I find that 2nd class traveling italians are more willing to strike up a conversation.