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Understanding Eurail's regional pass...

My brother and I have an upcoming trip to Italy in August. We want to see a few sights in Paris while we're there, so I did some looking at the regional passes for the Eurail. But I had some questions on how they generally work.

This is the scenario that I am not sure about: I have 2 youth regional passes with 4 days in a 2 month period of travel ($490 @ Eurail.com). I'm in Rome and I decide to travel to Paris (since I plan on staying in Paris for a few days I already understand that I have used up 1 of my days of travel). After a few days I travel to Venice, there I stay a day or two and use up another day of travel. I then travel to Florence to stay for a few days, but on one of the days I want to see Pisa.

Since I don't plan on staying in Pisa for more than a couple hours, could I then travel back to Florence or even to Rome on the same "day of travel"?

From my scenario this would leave me with 1 final day of travel, at least if I understand it correctly. Thanks for any clarification on how the regional pass "days of travel" works. :)

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Posted by
6898 posts

A couple of things that you should pursue. Both France and Italy charge a supplemental fee of some type for riding their premium trains. For France, this would be the TGV. In Italy, this is primarily the Eurostar. If you don't ride these trains, you will be OK. If you do, you will need to pay the premium.

As for the roundtrip from Florence to Pisa, it's CHEAP. 20Euro round trip. It's not worth wasting one of your travel days. I don't know the rules for traveling to two different cities on the same day although, you could book your ticket Florence/Pisa/Rome.

Posted by
8058 posts

For the day the pass is active, you can travel on as many trains as you can cram in. In fact, if you board a train to or from Paris (or anywhere) after 7 PM and it is an overnight train, you write down the date of the next day, basically extending your day to include the night before. Beware too that some France-Italy trains pass through Switzerland, not included in your pass.