We fly into Barcelona Sept 22 arriving at 4pm on a Friday and want to go directly to Girona. all I can find out so far online is to take a Renfe train from the airport to Barcelona Prat and then catch another train to Girona. I looked on Rail europe.com and some trains are $21 euros and some are $42 euros. I wonder why? is the lower fare ticket sold out? Is there a better train website to use? I tried Renfe.com but when I put in my dates the calendar says Nan nan nan nan not sure why or what that means.
should we buy our train ticket online in advance or wait until we get there. We are guessing that if we arrive at 4pm we should be able to make a 7pm train from PRAT station. Any thoughts?
Thanks so much
Andrew
Posted by
California 🦋
5294 posts
Andrew,
You can take the R2 Rodalies (commuter) train from the airport ( "Aeroport") to Barcelona Sants (runs every 30 minutes, and travel time = 20 minutes) There's no need to pre-purchase these tickets in advance since you don't know if your flight will be delayed or not. Once you arrive to Barcelona Sants station, take the train to Girona.
You can check train schedules on Renfe.com
Enjoy your trip!
Edit to add:
Here's the Barcelona Airport website where you'll find information about the location of the train station.
Posted by
Edmonds, WA 🌨 ☂
11881 posts
What I see here shows that time of day does affect the fare
https://www.trainline.eu/search/barcelona-el-prat/gerona/2018-09-22-18:00
Posted by
Washington DC
28094 posts
RailEurope is not a good website to use for train tickets. It doesn't always list all the trains, especially the less-expensive options, and there is usually (always?) a substantial booking fee.
There are both fast and slow trains from Barcelona Sants to Girona, and there are two flavors of fast trains, AVE and AVANT. If buying late, after all the discounted tickets on the AVEs have been sold, there will be a substantial fare difference between the AVEs and AVANTs. If you can snag a promo ticket on an AVE (unlikely for your travel date and time at this point), it can be cheaper than the AVANT fare, which seems to be 16.20 euros.
The slower trains take at least 72 minutes, vs. 38 minutes for the fast trains. Few tourists would consider that option, but I would do so on my arrival day if the AVANTs were sold out and I was looking at a 31-euro ticket on the AVE. I never accomplish much on my arrival day, anyway.
It's very difficult to predict how much time you'll need from your scheduled flight-arrival time to reach the train station downtown, so I wouldn't buy a ticket in advance. I see that there are roughly hourly slow trains starting at 5:29 PM, so even if all the fast trains are sold out upon your arrival, you will easily get to Girona. It will just take you about an extra half an hour. I have no idea what the situation will be like as far as seats go. There are no reserved seats on the slow trains, and they sell as many tickets as people want to buy.
You can monitor the status of ticket-availability on the fast trains on the Renfe website.