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Comment by jmkd | Hacker News Reader

The best part of interailling for me was turning up to a major train station, looking at the giant departure board, choosing an enigmatic destination and just getting on the train. No booking or reservations or even planning at any point.

Is this not possible any more?

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Quite a few countries (France, Spain, Italy for starters) require seat reservations in advance for any long-distance/high-speed trains now. And worse, they have a quota for passes, so even if the train has space, you might not be able to reserve a seat and therefore get on the train. A real shame as it makes it far less flexible than before.

For France, Spain, and Italy, only the inter-country and the high speed rails (TGV, Renfe, Iryo, Frecciarossa etc) require reservation?

In Switzerland, some of the touristy intra-country routes (ex: Tirano-Chur, Interlaken-Lucerne) may require (a rather expensive) reservation.

For Switzerland, that's only true for the special tourist train panoramic carriages on the route, there are normal trains running on the same routes, too, that don't require reservations.

In France, some destinations are served only by TGV. In Italy, taking local trains can take an eternity.

but with interrail the "useful" thing was to travel overnight, because that saves you one night of $$ for loding, so slow is actually fine.

I don't think fast trains (TGV, Frecciarossa etc) were ever covered by the interrail ticket anyway, were they?

They are covered, but you need a surcharge or a seat reservation, or both.

Yes. The app makes it really easy to do that. In our last trip we did it a few times.

But, as you get older, there's a certain joy in making plans in advance.

> But, as you get older, there's a certain joy in making plans in advance.

Am I the only one who feels the opposite? I used to take great care in making plans, knowing what's up ahead, knowing what I should know and so on. Spontaneous moments like "Lets go to X" were very infrequent. Nowadays, as a Proper Adult, I much more like going places without knowing anything about them, with as little plans as possible, figuring out what the place is from the people I meet there, and only start reading about the place once I'm there.

I fall somewhere in the middle these days- I really like knowing in advance that I have a place to sleep each night and that I have a way to get there, but then just do whatever I feel like in the moment for everything else.

We’re just finishing a two month Norway-focused motorhome jaunt. We planned the ferry from UK to Rotterdam (both directions) and two campsites in the Netherlands and Germany. After that it was two campsites ahead at most. Ended up visiting 21 campsites with no wild camping needed.

We’re both somewhere on some spectrum (and in our fifties) and it has been occasionally stressful for my partner. But we more often want to stretch a visit somewhere than curtail it, so flexibility has been pivotal to getting the most out of the trip.

We’ve identified five or so camps that we’ll definitely revisit next year or 2028, but they’ll be part of another freewheeling trip, I hope.

In general I’m a planner, a contingency-identifier and a worrier, but when we’re on the open road most of that goes out the window.

I never really planned in my youth, however as I'm older I have more responsibilities and planning in advance. We've just booked part of our summer family holiday for example

> however as I'm older I have more responsibilities

Yeah, same here, I guess that's why I'm opting for less planning, not more. I guess some people are just wired differently, that's what makes the world so interesting probably :)

Thanks, great to know. I hear you on at least knowing where you might sleep. Age 18-23 even this isn't that critical, when 'beach' or 'park' are viable answers.

For faster/intercity trains, it is still like that in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and most of central and eastern Europe [0]

France, Italy, Spain, Portugal & Sweden require seat reservations, as do most international services

Making reservations varies from easy to a complete pain

[0] https://www.seat61.com/how-to-use-an-interrail-pass.htm

Note that doing that in Ireland for intercity will result in you being _severely_ overcharged. Dublin to Cork is like 20 euro if you book in advance; I think if you buy the ticket in the station it’s over 60!

It’s fine for commuter stuff, of course, but I assume that’s the case everywhere.

Then you get situations like a last minute (ie: knew 30 days in advance) trip from Munich to Berlin where we found it cheaper to rent a newish mid-range Mercedes and it for two.

Sure we had to actually do the driving, but hard to turn down a journey on the autobahn as a tourist.

We are discussing having an Interrail pass. Are you talking about purchasing tickets without a pass?

The pass covers intercity trains and reservations are optional

It’s usually cheaper to book in advance. In particular if you want cheap seats on the Eurostar you have to books months in advance.

Eurostar Snap used to be cheap as balls. 19 quid. Though going there it seems that it's no longer available https://snap.eurostar.com/uk-en

What a pity. Lots of fun weekends in Paris on that when I was younger.

The Interrail reservations/supplements are fixed price (or for some SNCF trains there are two price levels as the train fills up). But their number is limited, so in a way the advice is the same.

Not for Eurostar. Interrail seat reservations are often more expensive than a new ticket.

I've taken Amsterdam-London with Interrail many times, usually €35, sometimes €57, often sold out. So yeah, two price levels; Eurostar is basically SNCF.

I've had on multiple occasions Eurostar reservations cost more than 300 €. I didn't buy them, of course.

Those were normal reservations, not Interrail ones, which I explicitly was talking about, trying to get the conversation back on track to Interrail which is the subject of TFA. Those high prices are what I meant with "sold out" above; in that case you get the prices for normal reservations listed instead of the Interrail ones. They are usually marked as such, though, e.g. on RailEurope it'll say "Rail Pass doesn't apply for this trip". Pretty big difference.

I used to do this but with Flixbuses and Ryanair. Back then one could fly from Frankfurt am Main to Milan for 15 euros.

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