When I wrote about airlines, good and bad, my conclusion was: choose the airline with the best app, because data matters. This year I bought a Eurail pass rather than individual tickets partly based on great reviews of the app. My experience was better than my best expectations.
I bought a seven-day pass in one month. It allowed me to pick any seven travel days in a thirty-day period and travel as much as I want on those days. I could book the tickets in advance or just take the next train as I arrived in the station. I did both.
The advance ticket was for the last travel day. I took the Eurostar from Brussels to London. It required a reserved seat which I bought through the app two weeks in advance. Many trains require buying seat reservations and on the most popular trains the seats can only be reserved on line well in advance.
But in major stations you can buy a seat any time up to departure in their ticket offices. I had to do this with several tickets. But in person the reservations are often cheaper than on line.
When buying tickets from on line apps, the prices rise cheap to pricey to crazy as the departure approaches. The Eurail app allows last-minute changes with no penalty. Any train in the network (most trains) are included in the price of the pass. I have seen Eurostar tickets costing nearly $300. Mine cost $51--one seventh of the $358 cost of my Eurail pass.
One of my travel days was from Vienna to Geneva--11 hours on two trains. The prices on Omio range from $227 to $304. With the Eurail pass, it was $51 plus a $12 seat reservation. My trip from Amsterdam on the four-hour express train would be $180. The 6.5-hour slower train $94. I took an unreserved fast train.
When I was in Grenoble, I could not book a seat reservation for Paris. Grenoble did not have a ticket office. So I took an unreserved train to Lyon, then got a seat reservation to Paris for $20.
When I left Paris for Caen in Normandy, I could not book the seat reservations on line. I went to Gare Montparnasse and made the reservations in Person using the SNCF on line system in the station. The seat reservations were $2 each way.
The seven days of rail travel:
August 26: Amsterdam to Frankfurt
August 29: Darmstadt to Vienna
August 31: Vienna to Geneva
(September 1, bought a $20 local train ticket from Geneva to Grenoble to avoid using a travel day.)
September 3: Grenoble to Paris (through Lyon)
September 8: Paris to Caen
September 9: Caen to Brussels (through Paris)
September 13: Brussels to London
