On the overnight OBB Railjet from Vienna to Venice, the attendant insisted that we give him our Eurail Pass and that it would be returned in the morning. It wasn't returned, and we had a terrible time with filing police reports and buying replacement tickets for the remainder of our travel. OBB Austrian rail system was extremely unhelpful, and required repeated attempts to even get them to respond to our emails. It took four months of assertive persistence to get even a partial refund from them. An OBB conductor later told us that there was no reason for the attendant to take the Eurail Pass from us. This was just one of several bad experiences we had with the Austrian rail system, so different from our positive experience in other countries. In the future, I would never let any rail official require us to turn over our Eurail Pass.
Posted by
Northamptonshire, England
33823 posts
Was that the same person who also took your passport? Didi they return the passport? Delicately asked, are you fairly sure that it was an Oebb attendant and not a fake?
Posted by
Rick Steves' Europe
16895 posts
It may be going away, especially if there's no change of conductors in the course of the trip. (This train is all run by OBB, unlike some other international routes.) But it has historically been standard procedure for the conductor to hold passes and tickets overnight.