Hello,
In September we will finish a Rick Steves tour in Nice, and will continue on our own to Vernazza for three days, then to Pisa and fly back to Paris. Our Questions: Can we buy the tickets in Nice for the entire trip to Pisa with a three day stopover in Vernazza? If not, where? Can this be done prior to our trip?
Thanks, Mary
Posted by
Minneapolis, MN, USA
8700 posts
First, there is no advantage to buying your tickets in advance. Your trip will require several connections, most of them on regional trains for which there is open seating and no discount fare for advance booking. If you take a leg on an IC train (reservation required), you still can buy your tickets literally at the last minute. The seat reservation is included in the price of the ticket and there is very little chance that the train will be sold out.
You definitely can buy tickets in Nice for Nice Ville to Ventimiglia which is the first station on the Italian side of the border. You also may be able to buy tickets in Nice for Ventimiglia-Vernazza, but it's possible you will need to wait and buy tickets for travel beyond Ventimiglia when you change trains there. There is no need to buy your tickets for Vernazza-Pisa until you get to Vernazza.
You can get detailed timetables on the German Rail site. After you get summary timetables for Nice Ville-Vernazza, click on the arrow to the left of the departure time(s) of your choice to see the connecting points. You'll see that you can leave Nice Ville as early as 05:23 and be in Vernazza at 12:04.
Posted by
OP
Bellingham
5 posts
Thanks for your reply. We have already visited the German site and saw that some of the train transfers were as close as 10 minutes. Do you happen to know if the trains are usually on time to make connections.
Your information was very good. Buying tickets and making reservations can be unnerving while you're also sightseeing, etc.
thanks again, Mary
Posted by
Eastern Iowa, USA
7560 posts
I agree that there is no need to get tickets ahead. You could very well buy tickets to Vernazza when you arrive in Nice (a whole ten minutes or so of time) and then the same to Pisa when you get to Vernazza. In fact for the Vernazza/Pisa leg; prepurchase tickets may not be available. But overall, there are many trains, so if there is a missed connection, in a short time there will be another, very easy to get around.