I will be taking a 11 day trip around Switzerland in July. I will be buying a Swiss Travel Pass (1st class). I was woring on the day I take the Gotthard Panorama Express. When I tried booking a reservation for my seats, the website only showed the train as having one "wagon". It was 75% empty for my day of travel, but all the seats on the side with the single seats were taken. All the photos I have seen of the train showed it with multiple wagons/car/coaches (whichever terms is appropriate). I would prefer my wife and I get single seats facing each other. Do they only show one wagon until it fills, then they add another? If so, am I playing with fire waiting to another wagon gets available or should I grab the seats I can get now?
Posted by
Chicago
3441 posts
First class is probably just one car/wagon. I would get whatever you can now.
Posted by
Chicago
3441 posts
OK. looks like the train part is 1st class only.
Hopefully someone who is familiar with this particular route will chime in.
Posted by
Green Bay
21847 posts
Out of curiosity, did you look at the seat map different dates?
Offhand, I would say that a lot of seats are reserved by tour operators like Vacations by Rail, and they will release their unsold seats when they get to their contract dates, usually 30 days ahead. Its a crap shoot. If your trip dates are all fixed, with flights and hotel reservations, you might just grab seats now and see if you can change them later when other seats open up.
Posted by
OP
3 posts
I decided o reserve the seats. First, I used firefox as my browser and put in my trip as lucern to lugano. When I clicked on buy, the system came back with "an error has occured" message. No explantion of what the error was. I tried again using Chrome. Same result (except the two seats I have chosen last time were now listed as occupied). I tried a third time using chrome and i chnaged my trip start to fluelen. This time I got passed the "Buy" button. But when it displayed my check-out summary, this is what it said for each passenger.
Gotthard Panorama Express
Seat reservation (Flüelen → Lugano)
Validity: Fri, 18.07.25 - 08:09 until
Fri, 18.07.25 - 10:41 Seat 25,
1st Class, Wagon 11
It says the ticket is only valid until 10:41 on the pay I want to travel. The train leaves fluelen at 14:09. Huh? Another oddity is the start/end times are exactly 6 hours different from the start/stop time of the time the boat goes from lucern to fluelen. I am trying to reserve the seats in a time zone that in July will have a 6 hours time difference from that in Switzerland. But even if it is just a time zone, why is it saying the seat reservation for fluelen to luganon is only valid during the time that the boat is sailing from lucern to fluelen?
Posted by
OP
3 posts
My bad, I mis-read the times (and got confused by the 6 hour time dif). If you modify the times by the 6 hours difference, it works out to 14:09 to 16:41. (It was especially confusing to me because we are already on daylight savings time. So the time difference NOW is 5 hours.