Raileurope Passes

If you and your friend buy youth passes, you will not be able to sit in 1st class. He will have to ride with the two of you in 2nd class. Someone with a 1st class pass can always choose to sit in 2nd class and reserve a seat in 2nd class.

However, the France-Italy pass individual and saver passes comes in a 2nd class version.

If you get 5 day France-Italy 2nd class passes, and in my experience passes are rarely cost effective, three Saver passes are $954 and 2 youth and a 2nd class individual pass are $948. Not much difference.

You can get fares for the Italian part of your trip from the Trenitalia website. In Italy, if you travel on the fastest trains, Italian Eurostar, there is a passholder supplement which can be half of the full fare ticket price, so a railpass is often not worth it.

And, by the way, Eurail is the official marketer of rail passes. RailEurope is a travel agency and just one of the resellers.

Thanks for the suggestions. This is our first trip to Europe and our first time on the trains so I know that buying passes or tickets online may not be entirely cost effective but we are willing to spend a bit more for peace of mind and to have things taken care of in advance.

I will look into the Eurail site again - my issue is that I want to buy passes with reservations and I might have overlooked it but I didn't see a place to purchase reservation on the Eurail site.

I did a "mock" schedule of point to point tickets as opposed to a pass with reservations and the pass option actually saved $200 a person.

However, the most important question I had (I may have worded it wrong) was if we can buy 3 adult saver passes even though my friend and I are considered "youth" both at age 24. We all want to sit in first class.

I posed a very similar question on this site a few weeks ago. After some wonderful advice from the experts here, I have become quite adept at navigating the different train sites and will actually save over $1000 by buying point to point tickets rather than railpasses. Of course, I am planning on buying the discount tickets as soon as they become available online. For me, I'd rather put in the legwork (or fingerwork) and have that money to spend elsewhere.

"I didn't see a place to purchase reservation on the Eurail site. "

This is one of the dirty little secrets of rail passes that they don't tell you. It is difficult to get reservations online. You can go to RailEurope and pay about twice the European price. For an extra $50, Euraide will write you the reservations at European prices from their Munich German Rail terminal and send them to the U.S.

German Rail (bless the Germans) will sell you reservations online for any reservable train in Germany and for German night trains.

With your particular routings, and ages, a pass plus reservations from RailEurope will work out to about the same cost as purchasing point to point tickets (walkup in Italy, advance web purchases for France)...a couple of dollars either way.
Your husband does not have to get a first class pass....there are second-class adult passes available for the France-Italy pass.
The opening window at RailEurope has a "reservations for passholders" link that will take you where you need to go for reservations only.

Lee,

Thanks very much for the clarification on Rail Saver web site. It seems to have been revised and re-structured fairly recently, and given the fact that it seemed to "encourage" Railpasses I naturally assumed it was owned by Rail Europe.

I also tried entering a few details of my Itinerary this year into the Rail Saver website, and it suggested only buying tickets, so it was somewhat useless for me. The information you've provided on "Lander" and other tickets is far more useful.

Cheers!

Lindsey,

You might try entering each of your Rail trips into www.railsaver.com and see what combination of Railpasses and P-P tickets the website suggests for you. I believe the site is owned by RailEurope, so keep that in mind.

You might also try contacting the Rail Department at ETBD, as I believe they are the largest vendor of Railpasses in the U.S. I'm sure they would be able to offer some great advice on which pass to choose (or P-P tickets).

Cheers!

Since you want to nail things down well in advance for peace of mind, you probably have already bought your plane tickets. However, if you haven't, you should check into flying open jaw (multi-city) so you don't have to backtrack to Rome (for example, home-Venice and Paris-home). Your best train route then would be Venice-Rome-Milan-Cannes-Paris. You would also save money by cutting out the long train ride from Paris to Venice.

Ken, Railsaver is not owned by RailEurope, but the company that owns them (Railkey?) does sell rail passes. Their website is very inaccurate (in favor of rail passes, of course). Like RailEurope and Rick's fare map, they only take into account the most expensive fares on a route.

I just input the trip I took in 2008 (FRA, Cochem, Braunlage, Bad Herrenalb, Mainz) and they said to buy a $282 railpass, and that was checking "If less expensive". Using Länder and Sparpreis (then Dauer-Spezial) tickets, I actually did that trip for €110, $150 at todays exchange rate, including reservations, which would have been extra with a railpass. So, using RailSaver's recommendation it would have cost me almost twice as much.

Thank you again for those that have responded. Please let me point out that I am not asking for suggestions as to what anyone thinks I should do in regards to not buying tickets in advance. I really would like to purchase them in advance and know our schedules in advance due to our itinerary. My questions were only pertaining to which type of pass I should buy for the three of us and how to purchase reservations.

Yes, we have already bought our plane tickets and I cannot change our rail schedule as we have already booked our apartments as well - the train schedule is as above because we are staying in 4 different cities over time we will be there; Rome, Cannes, Paris, and Venice.

I understand now that my husband does not have to sit in first class, but my friend and I (both age 24) would like to sit in first class for the bit of extra comfort, so I am wondering which pass to buy if this is the case (I am assuming it is the Saver Pass).

Sorry Lindsey, you keep using the terms 'tickets' and 'railpasses,' which are mutually exclusive.
RailEurope's main page has a link calls 'reservations for passholders.'
As for the pass itself, all three of you can purchase a saver pass, since it applies to as many as five people...the only dividing line is children versus adults; no 'youth' section. However, it will only save you money if all three of you go for first class saver passes.
Frankly, I find first class to be a waste of money....not enough extra comfort to make it worth my while. Second clas on European trains is far better than what you find in economy class on the airlines. And a France-Italy adult pass can be purchased for second class travel.
A quick look at your itinerary shows that second-class rail passes with reservations from RailEurope will work out to about the same as point-to-point tickets (walkup prices in Italy, booked in advance over the internet for France.)
But one of the issues you are going to have to watch for is your journey from Paris to Venice. Many of those trains go through Switzerland....and if a route takes you that way, you'll have to upgrade to a Select Pass for 3 countries. That is only available in first class for adults and saverpasses, and only second class for youth....so costs overall will be significantly higher. If you find that you have to opt for this, consider point to point, because it'll definitely be cheaper.

Now that you have told us that your itinerary is set and your apartments are booked, I calculated the best 1st class point-to-point fares I could find for all your routes, including advance purchase discount fares for Cannes-Paris and Paris-Venice. Even if you can get discount fares where possible, I found that you will indeed save some money by buying 1st class saver passes and paying for reservations where required. Taking the advance purchase discount fares into account, the savings would be around $70/person--if you do what Lee suggests and buy all your reservations for all three of you from Euraide at in-Europe prices for a single $50 fee. If you buy your reservations from Rail Europe, you will pay substantially more for them.

The fastest daytime route for Paris-Venice bypasses Switzerland so France-Italy passes would work. (Longer routes do go through Switzerland.) The direct Paris-Venice night train would also work.

Thank you all! :)

You're welcome, Lindsey!

Hi - I am the owner of http://RailSaver.com I want to clarify something - Railsaver is very accurate if you understand how to use it properly.

It is not designed at this time to give an accurate price on Point-to-Point tickets - it is designed to recommend the best pass and it gives the approximate cost of point-to-point tickets.

You have the choice of requesting passes only (won't consider the possibility of p2p tickets), if passes are more convenient (will only consider p2p if they are significantly less than the cost of a pass day) or, if less expensive (will more often recommend tickets but not at the exact price).

RailSaver is GREAT for quickly determining what pass you should get and is GREAT for determining if you should dig deeper into P2p tickets. Often the combination of a pass and P2p tickets is the best option.

We hope to have RailSaver connected to a decent p2p solution eventually but until then it is still a great tool to save time and money on determining the best pass,or combination of pass(es) and tickets.

Mike,

Thanks very much for posting that information! That answers a few questions I had about the site.

As I recall, the "old" Railsaver website would suggest the best combination of Railpasses and P-P tickets, so I was judging the "new" site on that basis.

Now that I have some idea on how it works, I'll try again to input the information from my trip this year. Unfortunately, I'll still have to calculate which legs to use P-P tickets on. It will be fantastic when you have that feature added to the website!

Cheers!

Mike, to paraphrase Maria in Sound of Music, Railsaver is very accurate, except when it is not.

In all fairness, I have done a lot of computer programming in my day, and I cannot imagine the kinds of algorithms it would take to get an accurate estimate of the true cost of point-point tickets, particularly considering the myriad of Savings and Länder tickets in Germany. I think you have an impossible task.

You have made advances in recognizing out-of-the-way places. A while back I ran a past trip through your website, and it couldn't recognize several of the towns. Now it can.

I have run my travels through your website many times, and it usually tells me to get a railpass, based on "less expensive", when I actually make that trip for half of the cost you recommend for the pass.

But, if you can't make an accurate estimate of point-point costs, you should not be using those inaccurate estimates to tell people it is less expensive to use a rail pass.

I agree that Railsaver is accurate at telling which railpass to use, but, in my experience, it is not accurate at comparing rail passes to point-point, cost wise.