Hi there,
Next week I am headed to Italy on my honeymoon. My fiancee and I will taking trains from Venice to Florence and then Florence to Rome. Can we just walk right up to the station and buy a ticket? Or is this something that's best to book ahead of time? How much does it cost?
Thanks so much!
Cheers, Ryan
Ryan, Congratulations on your up coming wedding!
You can buy your train tickets as you go. You can purchase them all at once when you arrive in Venice at the train station if you want.
You can use Italy's official rail site to give you the prices:
http://www.trenitalia.com/en/index.html
Just type in your to/from destination and time and you will come to a screen of trains, select one and then on the next page select "standard" and which ever class of service you want.
Good luck!
Gela
Get the tickets there. If you need to get a specific train you may want to prebook just to be on the safe side but personally I think you should be OK. Have a great time.
easy to buy them there as you go. Use the automated kiosks instead of waiting in ticket lines. It has an english menu. I'd recommend buying a day or so ahead of time so that you make better use of your time; its a waste of valuable time to head down to the station with all your luggage to find the next train leaves in 2 or 3 hours. Don't forget to validate your tix in the yellow box before boarding!
Ryan - We just returned from 2 weeks in Italy..and if you are in a train station and are sure about which trains you want and what days you want to travel, go ahead and make all your ticket purchases or reservations then. A day or two or three ahead is best....some trains you will not need reservations for, but others you may. Certain trains, like super new/fast ones require reservations but usually the man at the counter will tell you that. There is also an INFO window at most big stations if you have questions about schedules and costs and reservations, so go there first....Sometimes it's possible to go to the station, buy a ticket and get on the train an hour later...but one day we found out our train was full...so we had to make other plans and ended up travelling about 3 hours later that we wanted.
Hope that's helpful.
Tom & Sherry Trojanowski
Steger, IL
Thanks so much everyone for all your helpful suggestions!
We haven't traveled yet but I've tried to book overnight train tickets from Rome to Turino using Trenitalia's website and no matter what US credit card I use it gets tagged as fraudulent and gets rejected. My feelings...it's not worth the hassle to buy the tickets while you are in the states.
