Please sign in to post.

Train reservations in Italy

Posted by (Christchurch, New Zealand) on

Hi. I am so sorry to be asking yet another reservation question, but I just can't quite get my head around a couple of things, and would love some advice from people with real experience at this.

I am really just interested in whether people think reservations are strictly required on Cisalpino (Switz-Italy) and the Eurostar Italia trains in Italy, during early June. I understand that eurail passholders have limited seats, but with so many trains leaving the stations I wondered if you would have a pretty good chance of getting on one without any problem? Or is it that they will give you the boot if you don't have a reservation?

I guess my concerns are just that reserving a train in advance limits the options a bit. It would be nice to be able to be flexible within a few hours on these travel days. And also my brain is rebelling at the thought of paying up to 20 Euros per person per reservation for ES trains, when I can see this adding up to hundreds of extra dollars. I will be more than happy to do it if required, but just wanted to check on it to be 100%.

I should mention I will be travelling with my girlfriend, so there will be two of us looking for seats.

Thanks so much for your help.

Posted by
6898 posts

If you do not yet have the railpass, why do you think you need one in Italy? You don't. P2P is less expensive when you consider that you do pay an additional 15E-20E for each run with a Eurostar-class train. To answer your question, it isn't a matter of whether or not we think reservations are strictly required on the Cisalpino and Eurostar trains. They are absolutely required. I think that you may have meant advance reservations which you really don't need.

Also, if you have a railpass, I have not seen a feature on Trenitalia where you can buy the reservation fee in advance. I don't see it on Switzerland's website either but you can ride most of their trains without an extra fee. You can, however, buy the reservation on Rail Europe.

One final thought. If you ride the regional (R) or IC trains in Italy, you won't pay an extra fee with a Eurail pass. If you can work your schedule to ride on ICPlus trains, the fee is 5Euro.

Posted by
8 posts

Thanks for your reply Larry. I do already have my railpasses, which are valid for France, Germany, and Switzerland as well. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't going to pay hundreds of extra dollars for these Italian reservations and then show up only to find that the trains were half empty and no one seemed to be bothering with reservations. I will be more than happy to go ahead and buy them now.

I did look into the regional trains too, which is a good idea, but I think I will be happy enough to pay a bit extra for the time savings. Thanks again!

This topic has been automatically closed due to a period of inactivity.