Heading to Switzerland in September. I've waited WEEKS to reserve a 1st class seat on the Glacier Express for a specific date in September, 2025. Bookings are available 93 days prior to travel. HOWEVER the morning of the 93rd day before I tried to book 2 seats and found to my shock that ALL 1st class seats were already taken! Apparently the Tour Folks grabbed all the best seats. It turns out that if I had tried to reserve the night before at 10PM EST I might have had a slim chance of success. My point? The Switzerland Travel Guide should warn prospective Glacier Express passengers from the USA to attempt seat reservations when the window opens, which apparently in this case was 2AM Swiss time on the Swiss calendar. So now we sit in 2nd class for over 8 hours in an aisle seat. Crap.
Posted by
Bend, OR
1445 posts
Last year we did the Glacier Express with 4 seats across with rows facing each other which I assume was second class as my daughter did the reservations. It was a wonderful experience. The windows are very large.
Posted by
Wengen
3114 posts
Tour operators indeed snatch up block of seats when reservation opens. But they often do return seats when they do not manage to sell them on. So often later seats open again.
Alternatively you can travel the same route using regional trains, where you will not be hemmed in between tour groups, and where you can actually open the windows...
Posted by
OP
2 posts
So let me summarize the recommendation I have based on my experience. If you live in the USA and you're doing your own planning and have a specific date that you need to book seat reservations on Glacier Express: Seat Reservations go on sale 93 days prior to departure. Make sure to count this down on your calendar so that you know exactly what date is 93 days prior to departure. Then at 2AM Swiss time *the night before the 93rd day * which at the moment is 10PM EST, jump on there and book your seat reservations, meal, etc. I have done a LOT of reading and wish I had understood this from my reading but wasn't warned.
Posted by
Queens, NYC
585 posts
I went through this experience last fall.
The issue is that tour groups can reserve seats in bulk prior to the 93rd day, which is why you can end up opening the site 93 days prior and find that all the 1st class seats are taken.
However, groups must return unsold seats ~27 days prior to the train, so around this time a whole bunch of seats often become available as groups fine tune how many seats they actually need. This is what happened to me last year -- for a Glacier Express trip on 30 September, I was able to book 3 seats in first class on 4 September that all became available shortly before that.
There's more information here about this.