Slightly odd to be writing this at this stage, before the trip has even begun, but whilst I am very happy to be going on our train adventure, I think the Interrail pass itself is really not the best tool for us and where we are going. The Interrail pass saves a lot of money on walk-up fares, i.e. where you don’t plan. Also, if you’re not doing great long distances (and maybe you’re young and not travelling with a child or someone grumpy), you might not care about seat reservations either. If you’re traveling in Spain, France, Italy, you can get your seat reservations easily via interrail.eu.
However. We are traveling big chunky distances with kids (and I am grumpy) so we need seat reservations. Those seat reservations are not that easy to book – often requiring emailing to an address for the Baltics, with a lot of back and forth, sending money via bank transfer (Wise is great for this), frankly, a palaver. Even Sweden’s SJ.se, a great service in many ways, had updated their UI and forgotten about the Interrail option allowing you to buy just the seat reservations.
On top of this, we plan. We can’t help it. We haven’t planned everything in the places we’re going, but transport and accommodation – yes, booked ages ago. Booking the entire journey as a regular punter often is possible some time ahead, but the Interrail option comes later. (Not in all, or even most cases, mind you, but some.)
So I don’t think the Interrail pass saves you much, if anything, on the advance booking prices. Add to that that a) when I booked the Stockholm-Tallinn ferry, which should have had an Interrail option, this was greyed out, I assume because it’s high season? (I need to contact Interrail, as maybe I can get a slight refund) So that’s one travel day unused. b) we’re not using quite all our travel days anyway, we’ll have 2 left and c) we splurged for 1st class passes as they weren’t that much more than 2nd class…but not that many services have 1st class, so not a massive deal but again feels like this would be more value in Western Europe more than the Eastern side.
We’ll definitely do significant train-based holidays in Europe again (says he, before starting 2000km or so of rail travel for leisure!), but in future, I reckon we’ll just book what we want direct with the operators. So interrail.eu would become a similar service to the EXCELLENT seat61.com, which is indispensable.
Timsformational 