IS EURAIL WORTH IT? Everything You NEED To Know Eurail Pass 2023

welcome back to the channel everybody we are Jay and Nina we spent a year traveling all around the country in a van and now we are traveling through Europe while traveling Europe we used the year Rail Pass and I have a love-hate relationship with it love it for its affordable price and flexibility hate it for not being very user friendly or intuitive while I was planning our trip I was frustrated by the lack of information about using the past so after relying on this pass for our entire Europe trip I am making the video that I wish I had when I was planning our trip Jay's typically just along for the ride as I plan all of our trips so you can go now be nice Jay does a lot of other stuff for us he edits all these videos he's probably editing this one right now planning is my area of expertise so this is everything I know and everything I have learned about the eurail pass for starters your rail is for non-european Union citizens and inner rail is the name for European Union citizens so is your rail right for you and is it the best bang for your buck for us we did the two-month Global pass which included 50 15 travel days it was 370 dollars each and that is because we got a youth discount because we're both still under 26. so what is a travel day a travel day is a 24 hour calendar day starting at midnight and going to the following midnight during that travel day you can take as many trains as you want all under your url pass so what 15 travel days means over two months is for 15 days during that two-month span we can take as many trains as we want during that calendar day The Only Exception is overnight trains and for overnight trains the rule is that if you have no changeovers so meaning you don't get off the train and get on a new train after midnight it still counts for the original travel day and you're not using two travel days but say you're on a train and you have to switch over to a new train at 3am now you're going to be taking two travel days instead of one and then there's reservations the worst part about your rail not all trains are 100 included in the year Rail Pass there are some where where you need a reservation usually these are high speed trains and we found them to be most common connecting major cities now the perk of these high-speed trains is their high speed so you're usually going to get to your destination a lot quicker how fast have we been going but you need a reservation reservations tended to run about ten dollars a person but there's a little variance and that is an additional cost on top of what you already paid for your Rail Pass I'll go over how to make these reservations a little bit later but they're important to know about there's also certain no reservation routes that your rail is really going to try to push and advertise for we did not find these to be very helpful yes you can do a route with No Reservations but it's going to take you eight hours to get from Rome to Florence instead of one hour so they're not always the most ideal and it's usually worth it to pay the extra ten dollars so back to deciding if your rail is right for you my method was I went to rail europe.com it's not connected to URL even though it sounds very similar it basically has all the trains in your and I inputted all the trains I anticipated that we would take and added up the cost of what those trains would be paying out of pocket without a pass then I wrote down that number and put it aside and then using the year rail app it's called rail planner I inputted all of our Journeys that we wanted to take into that app to number one see if they were covered by your Rail and then to see if they had reservations if they had reservations I added the cost of the reservations to the total cost of the Year Rail Pass and once I was done with that I was able to compare the two numbers okay what's it going to cost out of pocket to travel Europe without your Rail Pass and what's it going to cost with a year Rail Pass and that is ultimately how we made our decision if you're only traveling to one or two countries it's worth looking into the single country passes your rail offers specific country passes but also most countries and their rail system offer country specific passes we liked your rail because they had that Global pass which allowed us to go all over Europe in between countries all the time more of our math equation to understand the value that we are getting out of our year Rail Pass was taking that 370 dollars that we were paying for our pass dividing it by the 15 travel days that we were getting that comes out to about twenty four dollars a day so we wanted to make sure that each travel day we were using our eurail pass for more than twenty four dollars worth of trains to really be getting the most for our money for example there was one day where we were traveling from nice to Monaco which is about a 10 train ticket and instead of using a whole travel day for that train we just paid out of pocket to save the travel day for when we would be doing a much longer distance more expensive train so something to know about having your rail is you're not committed to only using your rail you can still buy other tickets especially cheaper ones to save those travel days for more expensive train Journeys so now that you hopefully have a better idea if your rail is right for your trip or not it comes down to using the year Rail and overall just using the train system across Europe in general starting with reservations like I said I hate them we found three main ways to make reservations number one was at the actual train station we did this for our first few reservations because I was so confused on how to make them online that we were like we'll just go to the train station so I waited to make our your real train reservations till we got to the train station because because I could figure it out online but honestly like on desktop it was like thirty four dollars a person and then on mobile app I tried to do it and it was 12 a person for some reason it said our past numbers were invalid so I was like okay it's fine I'll just do it at the train station train station it was four dollars cheaper total for the two of us for the reservations so that was nice but we walked in and she was like hmm everything to Paris seems full today we might not be able to get you on the train and that was terrifying for a second it was hard to find the reservation office there's usually only one office in the entire train station it's usually pretty crowded and you have to wait in a long line and then after we finally found the office and waited in line we went up to the kiosk to try to get our reservation with some assistance and the lady helping us was like oh we're definitely sold out of those they've been booked out for a while luckily she was able to find us a reservation and it worked out all right for us but that inspired us to really figure out how to make our reservations online so that wouldn't happen to us again which brings me to way number two is on the mobile app so on the mobile app I never did successfully it was always is glitching and you'll hear that this is one of my main complaints with your rail is their mobile app is not so user friendly so I'll walk you through how to make a reservation and if it works for you then awesome once you have your trains plans all set up you click see details and then it will show you if where you need to make reservations on there there's some steps that you can follow and if it works for you you'll be able to make reservations on there like I said I was never able to so I wouldn't count on this one too much number three is online so using my laptop I was able to go onto urail.com input the train journey and find a reservation and then purchase it right through there the con of doing the mobile reservation so on your phone or on your computer instead of the train station is they always tack on an extra fee so the reservations go from being say ten dollars to Fifteen a person I would say ten dollars was about the standard for reservations but overnight trains longer trains it can really be anywhere to like thirty four fifty dollars I especially had issues with online and originally hadn't made them on there because because my app would tell me the reservation was going to be 12 and then I'd go on my laptop and it would say thirty four dollars and then when I went into the train station it was 10. so this is why I hate reservations because it's not easy to make and it's not consistent we did try to avoid them at all costs but like I mentioned earlier sometimes you just need them because we were traveling the off season we did get away with pretty minimal reservations or we were able to make them last minute because the trains weren't too crowded had we been traveling in the summer we definitely would have missed and not been able to get on the trains that we wanted to if we hadn't made reservations weeks and weeks in advance something else I dislike about reservations to keep the list going is once you make the reservation you are locked in they're not refundable so say you make your reservation online a few days before like we did a few times and then your first train to get to the reservation train is delayed by 40 minutes if you missed that reservation train you have to make a whole new reservation for a future train and you don't get that money back there's nothing you can do about it I wish I had a silver bolt for you of how to make reservations easy but the truth is they're just not so expect that always have a backup is what we found that if we don't get this reservation that we want we have this other reservation that we could do instead so next up with using your Rail Pass is cancellations the biggest perk of your Rail and why we loved it so much in comparison to just buying train tickets out of pocket is the flexibility say you want to cancel a train you want to change your route you want to go somewhere totally different you miss a train one is delayed you name it anything you want to do to change is usually super easy to do the only thing that you can't switch is once you start a travel day so say you have it on your plan that you want May 25th to be a travel day if it comes the morning of May 25th and that travel day is still active and you decide you don't want it to be a travel day anymore you can't change that now say on May 24th you're like oh tomorrow May 25th I have a travel day scheduled I don't want that any more you can turn it off and you're good to go it's just day of you cannot change a travel day once it has already started makes sense hopefully finding your train when we first started our Europe trip the first week or so we did not understand how to figure out what our app was telling us of our train from eurail and the train in the station so this is really important for just practically finding your train in the app you will see your train and it will have a train number where I really got messed up is when I was looking at the big light up board in the train station I was always looking for my destination listed now what I didn't realize is the destination that's listed is the final destination of the train and we weren't always getting off at the Final Destination so that's why it's important to look at the train number and the time that the train leaves and so I would try to match up our train number and the time with a train on the board that's how I would figure out what platform we were on so that big light up board in the train station will be your life trains in Europe are not like flights that was something we also didn't expect you don't have to be at the train station hours early just a few minutes we'll do the trick but definitely get there with enough time to look at the board and get your bearings something else that I was really off on was I thought all train stations were massive like the ones you'll see in Paris or Milan what I was surprised to find is most of the train stations were just tiny little houses with like a coffee shop and three or four platforms not a big deal and really easy to find your next train now if you are going into big cities then you should definitely leave more time to find your platform to walk through it onto other expectations and just things to know about trains in Europe and about your rail starting off with Wi-Fi so we were told that most trains in Europe have Wi-Fi so we went in expecting to get a lot of work done on our computers to always have connection for our phones and that was just not true we had Wi-Fi in Austria on the trains and for that reason we love Austrian trains but other than that there was no Wi-Fi on any other trains another note on Wi-Fi is I found it was pretty difficult to use your rail without having cell service out there if you're super well planned and organized and you just have Wi-Fi at your accommodations for the night you can get yourself all set up but to actually activate the tickets on your rail you do need to have connection and if you ever want to change something you miss a train you want to add a different one you're going to need service to activate a new ticket so we did get one cell plan while we were out there and it was on my phone so we had both J nice tickets on my phone and we went the last seven days of our trip without any self-service and we've definitely missed it there's a few trains that we kind of had to ride Rogue even though we had the pass that allowed us to just because we couldn't download The Right tickets at first we thought we could just screenshot the tickets to show them but they don't accept those there's a little time stamp in the corner and we often had the ticket Checkers come around and ask us to actually pull up the ticket so if there's no service on the train and you don't have a plan a sell plan you're kind of stuck usually once you're on trains if you're going in between countries they're not going to check your passport they're just going to come by and scan your ticket we did have two trains going into Austria where they checked our passports and we had one train where they came by and asked for our 10 reservation fee even though the train said you didn't need a reservation and everyone just had to pay it I don't really know what to say about that one they just came around and asked for it and everyone had to pay I don't think it was a reservation today I think it was like a border crossing tax but yeah just random things like that will happen expect the unexpected even though you probably won't need your passport to make sure they're handy when you're on the train so like I said both Jay and I's passes were on my phone and so you can put multiple passes on one phone you'll just save it on two separate trips you'll pull them up separately for the ticket scanner to scan our friend Jordan joined us for the last two weeks of the trip and he got the one month 10-day pass now we considered adding him also to my phone because I was going to be the one with service but because we were splitting up and he was staying in Europe while we were leaving once a pass is locked in on one phone you cannot switch it to another device so we did have him put it on his own phone and when he needed service I would just hot spot him once we left and separated from him we didn't want him to be without his pass so that is something to know if your group is going to split up at all make sure everyone has their own past on their own device because you cannot switch it and just log in on a different device like I said I don't love the URL app because I think it could be so much more intuitive but once you get the hang of it it's not too bad starting off you build your itinerary it's just on the home screen build your itinerary and you're going to add it to my journey once it's saved to your journey you need to actually go to your journey and activate it or turn it on that's that little slider and now you have the ticket for that pass when it's time to use the ticket you need to go to the my pass Tab and click on show ticket now this show ticket if it is a train with reservations you'll have to have that show ticket screen and you'll need to have your receipt either mobile or physical depending on the way that you made your reservation and they will scan both the QR code on your reservation and your Rail Pass once you activate a ticket and turn it on if that day is not already set as a travel day it's going to turn on one of your travel couple days so don't turn those on unless you're sure that you want that to be a travel day again if you change your mind and you're not actually on that travel day yet you can turn it off and you'll get that travel laid back I've had pretty good luck with flights in the past and I've never missed a connecting flight I've never had a delay that was too long and so I was a little bit naive going into these trains your rail will tell you if it's a short changeover it'll say like 10 minute change over in Red Letters when you're on that planner or it'll say six minute changeover and I was a little bit confused by that and thought the only reason for it was not enough time to get from one platform to another in a big station but what I realized being in Europe is trains are always delayed I think we had more delayed trains than we had on time trains so that is something to expect we found out very quickly that if we had a short changeover that we always needed to have a backup train in the back of our mind to take in case we missed it so just in general having backup plans is probably a best practice chances are if you've got a short changeover you might miss your next train and it is good good to not be stranded we got off our other train that was two minutes late and our other train is delayed which is what we're hoping for but it's late an hour so we're here for another hour but that's much better than waiting two hours for the other trains we found ourselves running from train to train pretty often run are the perks of the Year Rail Pass is that you can take as many trains as you want in a day so sometimes you might want to go from Florence to Rome just wander around the city of Rome and then hop back on a train from Rome to Naples or something equivalent while you're exploring Rome you probably don't want to be carrying all your bags so a lot of train stations have lockered storage knowing when to get off your train can sometimes be difficult sometimes like in Austria we love the Austrian trains there's a really nice light up board that shows you which stop you're at which shop is coming next what time it's supposed to arrive and all of those details and then sometimes we just make an announcement and it's in a foreign language and you're trying to understand and see if that's your stop and sometimes they don't say anything you're just pulling up to stations randomly so something that I would always do is I would look in the app at what time we were supposed to arrive at our destination I would set an alarm for 5-10 minutes on my phone before that time so my alarm would go off before we were supposed to get off and I would know to start paying attention I Port my Apple Maps and zoom in and see what city we're on see if we look like we're close because you don't know if they're going to tell you there were a few times where we didn't know if we had stayed on the train too long there was a few times that we got off the train too early and so setting that alarm and being pretty diligent about paying attention when you're supposed to get off is going to be important not all trains are going to make it very easy for you your rail gives you the option when you're buying your pass to buy either first class pass or a second class pass first class of course is more expensive and a lot of trains don't even have a first class so in our opinion it wasn't worth it to do the first class you probably are not going to get very much out of it now when you have your rail something important to know is not every single train in Europe is part of the Year rail pass some of those really famous trains like the glacial Express are not going to be included or we had a few in Switzerland and in Austria getting into little mountain towns that we had to pay out of pocket in addition to our eurail pass sometimes the URL pass gave us a discount so when we were at the kiosks we always looked for an opportunity to put that we had a year Rail Pass we had once where it knocked at 50 off and that was awesome but know that not every single train you take is going to be part of the pass your rail advertises buses and boats to be included in the past we found that this is just very select buses and boats we never took a boat it would have been cool but it just wasn't part of our itinerary so I don't know much about that buses your average public transportation bus in all the cities and towns we were in was not included we did have once though where it said it was a train and then when we were looking at the big board at the train station it said it was a bus so we got on the bus and it got us to our destination it happened to us once it was random and we had no way of telling that it was a bus it just happened to be one so I wouldn't say that's normal or common but that there are a few of those included in the past and you might find yourself unexpectedly on a bus or a boat at some point as you may or may not know public bathrooms in Europe cost money trying to save every penny you can you don't want to pay a dollar every time you have to go to the bathroom so we got really good at maximizing the bathrooms on the trains I would always go pee right when I got a train and right when I was about to leave because bathrooms on the trains are always free so take advantage of that because at the train stations you'll have to pay when I was planning our places to stay I was always looking for a place to stay right by the major train station something I wish I knew or that I thought of was that trains have multiple destinations in between big cities so in our case we're taking a train connecting nice to Monaco and the only two places I looked for places to stay was in nice or in Monaco and what I wish I had thought of is there's like five stops in between those two cities and we could have stayed in any of those small quaint towns right by the train station there for cheaper and we could have avoided the crowds of the big city so if I was going back I wouldn't try to stay near the main major train station I would try to stay next to a smaller train station along the Route because we love those small towns and Villages so much and we wanted to spend more time in those and less time in the big cities now another thing with having the urail pass is you might make the Assumption oh all my transportation is covered with this pass and once you're actually in the town or the city that you're in you're still going to have to pay for public transportation around that area so for example when we were in Paris we were constantly buying Metro tickets because the Metro is not part of the Year Rail Pass we also didn't want to use up travel days just for getting a five dollar ticket to the Eiffel Tower or when we were in the Amalfi Coast we were taking those buses and that was about two dollars a bus ride which is not all that expensive but it does add up so make sure to factor in transportation costs in addition to the major trains another money saving tip with trains is to avoid buying food on the train or in the train station most long trains have dining cars and we did find ourselves getting coffee every once in a while from those dining cars and of course train stations usually have places to eat but they are far more expensive than just going down the street and finding a local food stand so if at all possible go to the grocery store bring snacks on the train pack a meal to go instead of relying on the trains to buy your food so if you look on the your Rail website you'll see there's a ton of different options like I said we chose the two month 15 day pass but you can do one month 10 days I think there's one month seven days there's all sorts of variety it's about finding what works for your trip the best there is no Rhyme or Reason for us we had about 13 travel days planned in our itinerary and 13 is not an option so we picked that 15 day as kind of a buffer and we were able to add two extra days as we went throughout our trip we ended our trip using the entire 15 days partly because we wanted to maximize it and get the most for our money and also partly because we ended up adding on a spontaneous Austria trip for the last two days of our trip and we needed that buffer of extra travel days so sometimes it is helpful say you're debating between the seven and the 10 day my advice would be go for the 10 day and have a little bit of buffer we found ourselves using your rail very grateful that we hadn't done individual train tickets just for how much we changed our schedule and honestly how many trains we missed had we booked all of our trains ahead of time and been planning on them for weeks and weeks and weeks we wouldn't have had that flexibility and when we missed trains we would be out that money we were with your rail we could just cancel one and add a new one hopefully this video hasn't been too long and boring I wanted to include all the possible information I could think of and give it to you as a resource to use overall I would do your rail again it's not a perfect system but it is a great way to travel around Europe and really maximize your time please leave any and all questions about this down in the comments I will try to respond to every single one because I wish I had someone I could ask these questions to when we were planning for our trip also queued up in our videos to make is a video all about traveling Europe money saving tips so if you have any questions about traveling Europe in general that you want to see included in that video also leave those down in the comments I'll hold on only 55 minutes hopefully as you're watching this video it's like 14. a little behind the scenes for you [Music]

Channel: Jay x Nina

Views: 124,017

Keywords: is eurail worth it, eurail pass, everything you need to know eurail, eurail pass explained, eurail global pass, eurail pass reservation, eurail pass 2023, eurail, eurail videos, eurail made simple, eurail pass tips, eurail guide, eurail pass review, eurail vs interrail, eurail pass how it works, eurail worth it, eurail pass differences, eurail planner, watch before traveling, budget travel, train travel, travel vlog, europe travel vlog, backpacking europe, Eurrail

Id: pt4ZbWTMEio

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2023