If your trip is something like Germany-Austria-Switzerland, that is about as good as it gets for the Eurail pass. Practically no trains require reservations. You can hop on, hop off pretty much any train with no additional fees. That was my first experience with the pass a few years back, and it was great. And considering the price of train fares in these countries, the pass is a great value with no hassle.

If your trip is something like Spain-France-Italy, that is about as bad as it can get. Every train in Spain and Italy requires you to pay a reservation fee. In fact, the “reservation fee” from Madrid to Toledo I was told was €20 (10 each way), however I could just buy a return ticket for €12!!! (might be mis-remembering the exact amounts as this was 3 year ago, but point is it was cheaper to buy the ticket outright than to pay the res fee for an already paid pass). Other reservation fees were around €24 for first class and €10 for 2nd. What sucks is that over 26 you are forced to buy the 1st class pass, but then end up traveling 2nd class because you don’t want to pay the crazy supplements. When I added things up in Spain, I definitely did not save money when looking at point to point tickets versus pass+res fees (Madrid-Toledo return, Madrid-Cordoba, Cordoba-Seville, Seville-Granada, Granada-Barcelona)

And in France, it is even worse now. I noticed NomadicMat replied to “Unstatisfied” comment about not being able to get a seat with “No, it’s not. I never booked a train more than 24 hrs in advance and never once had a problem” – well sorry to say – just because you never had a problem, does not mean it is not true. TGV and Thalys (might be others now as well) now yield manage the Eurail seats on their trains. What that means is that only a set number of seats will be given to Eurail pass holders. I experienced this twice on my last trip to Europe (August 2010).

Our trip from Paris to Cologne on the Thalys – we had to pay a €50 supplement each (not a typo – FIFTY). I thought it was ridiculous, but we HAD to take that train, so we went ahead and booked it. Once we were on the train, I was surfing the web and went to Thalys site only to see the Paris-Cologne route being advertised at €29!!!

And at the tail end of that trip, heading back to Paris from Basel, the gentleman behind the counter (employed by SBB – Switzerland Rail) went on a bit of a rant about the TGV and railpasses. He bragged about how they (Swiss) didn’t extort money from tourists with these reservation fees for passes they already paid for, but that the TGV from Basel to Paris was almost impossible to get for a pass holder. He said if you want that train on a pass, you probably need to book it 3 months out as he had never once seen it available. The rate we were offered was almost €200. But, he was very nice and printed off like 5 connections to get me to Paris on local trains. So what we had planned as a 3 hour trip ended up taking over 10 hours.

As for Italy – I think the have recently reduced the cost of reservation fees, but more trains require them now. And if you look at Trenitalia’s website, there are very few routes that will be more than the cost of one day on a pass (unless it’s the consecutive day passes). For example the popular routes like Florence-Venice, Florence-Rome, Rome-Venice are all between €30-€45 (which includes reservation fee).

So in a nutshell, in my opinion of course:

Germany, Switzerland, Austria: Awesome! Great Value
France: Not great if you plan on getting on TGV for certain routes. Otherwise, not bad. Reservation fees are very cheap in France which is good, as long as the seats are available)
Spain and Italy: Not really a good value due to high reservation costs and relatively cheap trains tickets.

From my own travel experiences in Italy, I have decided to make sure no one falls victim to the horrible experiences we had on TrenItalia or buy a Eurail pass here. While on the trains we were constantly confused about which ones we could use. Because of this we often asked the information desk for help. However, we ended up being kicked off of several trains because of the confusion. On one train in particular we were threatened by a train conductor who told us he would have us arrested if we did not pay the supplement which we did not know existed. We said we would politely get off at the next stop as it was a misunderstanding. He called his police friend up who took our passports and recorded them somewhere. We got off at the next station and went to the information counter again to try to clear things up. While waiting in line behind some other students with eurail passes we discovered that they were attempting to go on the exact train we had just been kicked off of and threatened on, and the information were telling them they could go on that exact train. We argued with the information telling them no and then took the students with their eurail passes aside and warned them against going on that train.

Several other times we were kicked off trains, and stranded, forced to sleep in train stations. Please do not write back if you just wish to tell me that I should have read tiny subsections hidden within the fine print of your endless list of legal documents used to defend yourself against any allegations. I hope no one has to experience the horrible mistreatment we suffered in Italy and I am recommending and posting on all the travel sites this experience so no one has to deal with what we did.

Sincerely,
Dale Sakamoto

Frustrating I am sure but not Eurail’s fault.

As for the uk: you don’t need bookings, just get right on. The UK train system, with or without your rail pass, only allows booking with a UK mailing address. This is not new. It has been this way for many, many frustrating years.

Wait time: You had to wait in line? Welcome to life.

I would ay to you and Unsatisfied that the problem here is not the pass but your expectation that the pass was “free travel” which it is not. There are fees involved and depending on how you are traveling the pass itself can actually cost more as I said in this article.

Here are a schedule of fees for trains:

http://www.eurail.com/planning/train-seat-reservations/overnight-fees

As you can see and on the other pages for day trains, there is a RANGE of fees, with some as small as 10 Euros. On most day trains, the fee is only 2-5 Euro.

I don’t know why you were paying 77 Euros.