Eurail Global Pass Using the Mobile Option: A beginners guide to using the Eurail app and understanding what it is doing.

 

My wife and I purchased a 22-day Eurail Global Pass, mobile option, in mid-2022. We were going to be starting our trip from Worthing on the south coast of England in mid-September, and wanted to make a round trip of visits in France, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands and France again before returning to London. We didn’t want the hassle of either flying (where there were major disruptions happening on a regular basis, e.g. at Heathrow and Schipol airports), or driving – the latter would have required a vehicle rental, and cost a lot of money.

We live in New Zealand, which doesn’t have a rail network to speak of, so we are complete novices when it comes to train travel. Whereas (generalising here), European rail systems provide excellent and efficient linkages between major cities and towns, and Europeans treat train travel as second nature. We were total dummies when it came to using our Eurail Pass. You might say we are slow learners, but it wasn’t until were about half-way through our trip, with a couple of ‘misadventures’ under our belt, before everything finally clicked into place. We figured there would be many others in the same boat as us (though faster learners!), so thought it could be useful to document some of our experience.

By the way, out trip was a great success, and the Eurail option was brilliant for us. But we were very unsure and nervous about it all when we were setting our trip up a week or so before we planned to start to travel. At one point, we even doubted whether we could make the Eurail thing work, and considered baling out while we were still in England and writing-off the up-front payment as one of life’s hard lessons about the value of proper preparation (full disclosure here!).

The major reason for this is that we just couldn’t understand what the Eurail app was doing when we set about using it. We noted that the app had only about a 2.7 rating, which indicated we weren’t alone on this score! People were obviously having trouble with it.

In the end, we concluded the app is actually very good, with one or two glaring gaps. It worked really well for us. So, we do recommend it as a great way to facilitate visits to the many glorious treasures to be found on the European continent.

Value for money?

We ended up doing 38 separate train journeys during our 22 days: 76 if you count twice for 2 passengers. Our Pass cost ~$NZ1,800 total, for both of us: with seniors discount, which we used to buy first class travel. So, on average, $NZ24 per journey. The regular fare for the first two trips we did (Eurostar from London St. Pancras to Paris Nord; then Gare de Lyon to Marseilles) came to about $NZ700 each, or $NZ1,400-ish. So, we were almost break-even after two trips. Not quite, but you get the idea – good value was had.

The other thing we loved about travelling this way was that the trains take you right to the city centres (as opposed to airports which are out of town), you have your luggage with you when you arrive (no waiting at baggage carousels or problems with lost luggage), there are no parking hassles (let alone the stress if driving in big busy foreign cities), and there is plenty of accommodation and restaurants/bars right there at your disposal. Very stress-free. Plus, you get to see plenty of scenery and sights as you travel.

 

 

Overview of how it works

I’m going to skip all the stuff about how you decide when you travel and which Pass is best for you (there are many options in terms of duration, number of countries included, whether you want mobile or paper options for ticketing and so on), and just concentrate on the mechanics of the Eurail app in the mobile pass option. There are plenty of other web sites that tell you about the different types of passes (there are many) and give good advice on how to choose among them. But we found no information on the practical realities of making your app work. That’s what this blog seeks to do.

The key ‘indicator of success’ when using the app is getting to the point where you can display the QR code for your journey/journeys on each day that you travel. This is your ticket for the day, which you will use to either scan-in at the turnstile as you enter the platform (just like scanning-on through the gate at the airport with your airline app as you board) and/or show to the inspectors on the trains.

If you don’t have this ticket to display on your phone, for whatever reason, then you either won’t be able to get onto the platform, or the on-board inspector will make you pay the fare for the journey, potentially with an additional charge (e.g. €50) per person for ‘payment on the train’. This happened to us once: while costly, it was also an ah-ha moment when we finally realised how all the pieces fit together.

Main steps in using the Eurail mobile app

Once you have paid for your Pass, you will receive a Pass Number: this is a six letter/number string. The only time you’ll use the Pass Number (most probably) is for the next step: setting up your journey plan in the Eurail app.

Download the Eurail app to your phone (it will appear as ‘Rail Planner’). Once installed, there are three steps: adding passes to the app; creating your trip (or part thereof); and activating the pass.

1. Adding your Pass/Passes to the app

In Rail Planner, go to My Pass, and enter your last name and Pass Number. If there are 2 or more people travelling on the same route, enter Pass Numbers and names or all travellers at this point. You should see the Pass, or Passes, displayed as a card/cards when you open the ‘My Pass’ option in the ribbon at the bottom of the home screen.

The app can only be installed on one device. Typically this is your phone – I guess it could also work on a device that has a phone function. So, make sure you have a good smartphone with a good battery! [And plenty of data in your phone plan, preferably unlimited] You will be toggling between the different individual passes on this screen as you go – for example, to show an inspector the QR ticket for all travellers when requested.

2. Creating your trip and activating your pass

This is where you use the app to identify train services and connections to get you from A to B on the day you want to travel. The app is plugging in to all the rail timetables throughout 33 countries as you do this – it is very powerful and, in our experience, 100% accurate.

Select one of the Pass Numbers/names entered and create a new trip for that Pass Number/name. Later, you will be able to link the plan you have created using this first Pass Number/name to other Pass Numbers/names and copy all the details across. Or just copy the individual journeys that you’re sharing across and add other journeys for the second Pass Number/name as required.

Usually there will be several options displayed for each journey you want to take. If it is a direct journey from A to B, it most likely will run several times a day especially if between major centres. So just pick the time you prefer. If the journey requires connections (from A to B via C and D) then options may be limited and you’ll need to allow enough time between arrival and departure in case of delays, and for the time required to find and get to the platform for your next journey. All the connections will be displayed in the app, with departure and arrival times, station details, and the service number (like the fight number for air travel).

Work through, day-by-day, picking the options you want and selecting ‘Add to My Trip’. check

You may see a little info line under one or more of the services you have chosen saying ‘Seat reservation required’. Take note of this: if it says a reservation is required, a reservation is required – no ifs or buts. Unfortunately you cannot link from the Rail Planner app to a site where you can reserve your seat on line. All the app tells you is you need the reservation, it doesn’t give you options to do this. There is general blurb on the Eurail web site about how to do this, but we didn’t fund this helpful. This is one of the glaring gaps referred to above, and it created a lot of doubt in our minds about how we were going to get this sorted. More on this below.

As noted below, you don’t have to plan your whole trip at this stage. We did for our 22-day Pass, but in hindsight, had we been confident in the Rail Planner, and knew how it worked in practice, we might well have just done the first few days and built the rest up as we went. This is one of the advantages of the mobile Pass option compared with the paper options which (I imagine) would be more difficult to change. No matter, we had a great experience nonetheless.

What you should see in the My Trip pages of the app (select ‘My Trip’ from the ribbon at the bottom of the screen) is a list of your journeys

Copying/linking to another Pass Number/name …

Remember, at this stage, all you have is a plan: nothing is locked in or confirmed. Confirming everything is the critical next step.

Activate your pass. Once you’re happy with the trip plan you’ve created, enter your passport or ID details and choose your first travel day. The first travel day can be changed: it just gives you a starting point to map out your full trip, or part thereof. Nothing is locked in at this stage. Likewise, you don’t have to put your full trip in at this point. It’s very easy to add other individual journeys as you go. It takes only a few minutes with the app, entering your departure station and arrival station for a chosen date and picking your preferred route from the options given by the app.

Note: the first travel day is only fixed when you confirm your first trip, as described in the next section. Thus, the ‘clock starts ticking’ on your pass (whether that be the 8, 15, 22 or 28 day option) at this point. In our case, day 1 was 18^th September, meaning the last day we could travel on our 22 day pass was 9^th October.

Confirming your trip and getting QR code tickets

For each day on which you have journeys planned, you need to confirm those journeys, and Rail Planner will then generate the all-important QR code and facsimile of the paper ticket for that day of travel. It doesn’t matter how many separate services you are taking that day, one QR code (ticket) will cover them all.

You confirm your planned journeys by selecting the ‘confirm’ option for each individual trip shown in the list of journeys for the day. Once you have done this, the QR code and ticket facsimile will be generated and display on the screen/page.

Now is the time to check that you have a valid ticket for each day of travel. Go to ‘My Pass’, select your name, and you should see a calendar spanning your period of travel with a little orange dot under the dates when you have journey/journeys planned. Tap on one of these and it should bring up a screen with your QR code, meta-information, and a facsimile if the paper ticket. If you see that, bueno! All is in order and you can relax.

If there is no dot showing on a date you thought you had a journey/journeys planned, then check

Seat reservations

Many train trips in Europe require that you have a seat reservation as well as your train ticket.  These are two separate things and, as we discovered, the Eurail app only gets you your daily travel ticket – you can’t do seat reservations with it. Below, we explain how we got out reservations: there may be better ways of doing this, but we didn’t figure them out. So we did it in what could be called a ‘long-hand’ way, but it worked for us.

First of all, which trips require a reservation? We found we needed reservations on:

·         Eurostar

·         TGV fast trains in France (quite likely for fast/heavily-used inter-city journeys in other European countries too)

·         Several services between main centres in Italy

Reservations mean you get an allocated seat number on the train you’re using. You will also get a hard-copy reservation confirmation – like an old-fashioned ticket. Note, this is not a substitute for the ticket: you still need the e-ticket (QR code).

There’s an important point that follows from this: while you can get your ticket for a journey via the Eurail app, this does not necessarily mean there will be seats available on the service. The Rail Planner app doesn’t know about bookings or demand, it just knows what services are available. Rail Planner will tell you if a reservation is required on the service you want, but won’t tell you how to make the reservation, or give you a link to sites where you can do this (we did not discover an on-line way to do this – but there may well be on available).

Though not necessarily required, it can be advisable to reserve a seat on services running on busy travel days, like public holidays or Fridays when lots of people are wanting to travel. We did make non-compulsory reservations on a couple of trips toward the end of our journey, aware that we needed to be back in London by a fixed date ready to fly out the next day. Just making sure …

One journey where we encountered over-crowding was from Lille Europe to Calais in France: it was a Friday, and it looked like heaps of young people, especially, were heading away for the weekend. In this instance, people were standing in the aisles – like the London underground. Not a problem for a short-ish trip like that one, but you can see why reservations are mandatory for long inter-city and fast train services.

How to get seat reservations

We did it as follows:

·         Eurostar: we went to St Pancras a couple of days before our planned trip and got the reservations across the counter at the Eurostar service desk (right by the departure area). We got reservations for the outward trip, and for the return trip from Lille to London, at the same time. All done, no fuss. Cost about £30 per person per trip.

·         TGV Paris Gare de Lyons to Marseilles: we reserved these seats at Paris Nord when we arrived from London, at the SNCF service desk in the station. Cost €20 per person.

·         Ventimiglia to Genoa: we were able to reserve on this one at Paris Nord too.

·         four services in Italy (Genoa-La Spezia; La Spezia-Florence; Florence-Milan; Milan-Brig, in Switzerland: We reserved all of these in one hit at Tren Italia service desk at a town between Ventimiglia and Genoa (long story …. something about being kicked off the Ventimigila to Genoa train for not wearing a mask ….!). Cost €27.50 p.p.

We never figured out if it was possible to reserve ahead for services in another country. We were able to do this for Ventimiglia to Genoa (did this in Paris - see bullet point 3, above), but were told that we couldn’t on other occasions when we tried, So, we ended up doing reservations within-country, which worked OK: just a matter of taking the first service desk opportunity in the country of travel to make forward reservations).

If you’re really averse to the idea of reserving ahead or/and paying a bit extra, you could ask Rail Planner to give you only options that do not require a reservation – but note, this will mean slower trains and frequent connections for the sake of avoiding (in our case) an additional ~ 20% cost over and above the base Eurail Pass fee.

Things to watch out for

Take careful note of the station at which you arrive in a city, and the station from which you depart. The big cities generally all have multiple stations. So, for example, if you’re booking accommodation near your arrival station, check your departure station and if it’s different, allow time to get there – with your luggage! There’s nothing worse than having to rush by foot, or flail about anxiously waiting for a taxi, to get your connection. European cities are always big/complex, busy (on the footpaths and roads), and with difficult to read-find-interpret street names. Mrs/Mr/Gender Non Specific Google Maps doesn’t always understand this so don’t trust its estimated time by foot or car. Sometimes it simply disconnects and/or loses the plot leaving you with an info vacuum.  

Note also, if you have no dependencies for the journey that you’re likely to miss, you can simply delete that one in Rail Planner and add a later journey if necessary. Dependencies could include: you have (and have paid for) a seat reservation, and will have to get another one (not necessarily simple – see above); you have connecting journeys and it could get messy, especially if there’s accommodation booked (and paid for) ahead.

Conflicting/overlapping journeys

This is where you might have added two journeys to your trip for the same day that overlap time-wise. This could happen for example when comparing different options in Rail Planner and adding them to your list for the day. Unless you delete from your list the options you decide against, the app won’t know which one you want so won’t confirm anything for that day. We hit this problem one day, for one of our two passes: when asked to show the ticket for that day, nothing came up except a message saying ‘You have no travel planned for this day” or something like that.

Without the QR code, the inspector (rightly) said (in forceful Italian) “you don’t have a ticket to travel today, so you must pay for the fare now” (and pay extra as a penalty!).  We were surprised because we mistakenly (naively) thought that the QR codes we were seeing were for our overall Pass: and therefore that it was the same code each day, and we could show any version of the code. “Hey, we’ve already paid for the ticket, so what’s the problem?” Yes, we’d paid for the Pass, but that is just like a voucher that has to be converted to a ticket.  

Capital- or major-city centering

Rail Planner doesn’t always do small-scale travel within countries well. It seems to want to take you via major towns and cities, which can involve having to backtrack to stations already passed to make the next onward leg – and costs time.

We experienced this problem in Switzerland, where Rail Planner seemed to work off services to the capitals of the 22 Cantons. This isn’t great if you want to make a trip that is reasonably complicated Our example was travelling from the small village of Tschamut (which, like almost all villages in Switzerland, is serviced by rail) to St Moritz. Rail Planner wanted to take us from Desentis to Chur (the Canton capital), then take us back to Reichebach-Tamins, which we had already passed on the Desentis to Chur leg, before going onwards to St Moritz. Simpler to select Desintis to Reichebach-Tamins, but we only knew to do this because we were staying with friends locally who immediately spotted the issue.

Message is, check the in-country rail timetables first to piece together the connections that get you to destination in the shortest time – there’s always plenty see in the great destinations in e.g. Swiss Alps, so use the time for that rather than spending extra time on trains! Then, in the Rail Planner, put in departure and destination info leg-by-leg. Also, it’s very useful to have a good map so you can see the ‘direction of travel’ in all cases and know what towns you’ll be passing through.

Fall-back position: just let Rail Planner do its thing and allow extra time in your overall plan. It’s certainly simpler! Places like the Swiss Alps can get very tricky – rail will get you anywhere, but fastest travel time will involve several changes.