Impromptu four-day tour: Sums
Zen and the Art of Spreadsheet Maintenance
I buy Interrail passes the same way some people buy emergency chocolate: not because it's needed right now – although who ever saves chocolate for later? – but because you know there will come a moment when you mutter “f—k it,” grab a tactical backpack, and flee the country.
Because adventure.
I bought this one in September – 287€ for four days' first class travel in one month – and, true to form, ended up deploying it in a flurry of semi-planned journeys, mostly to avoid paying the full price of UK trains, which are seemingly priced using a random number generator and a grudge multiplier.
tl;dr
Even using only three days of a four-day pass, I made significant savings over the cost of buying point-to-point tickets at the kind of notice most people book haircuts.
James
Interrail seat reservations are a sport, and I am an elite athlete. I booked everything through Raileurope on the 10th October, 13 days before I travelled. For UK trains, no reservations are necessary with Interrail although it never hurts to make one.
My seat reservation in first class cost 10€ for the 09:46 from Bordeaux to Paris, instead of 182€ if I'd bought it outright on the Kafka-Milgram Memorial Funhouse that is SNCF Connect. The Eurostar reservation was 40€ for first class. I'd wanted to go through Lille for reasons of my congenital slothfulness, and to avoid watching a man pick his scabs and vomit all over the floor of métro line four, but there's no gain without pain. Nonetheless, the reservation for the 14:24 Eurostar to London was significantly cheaper than the 207€ I'd have paid for a ticket. Once made, it was easy to import the booking into my Eurostar account and tweak seating and meal preferences.
UK trains, for all their faults, demonstrate how train operators should work with Interrail. I made a seat reservation with Avanti over the phone for free, even though this was not necessary. The pass spared me the 282,66€ fare from Euston to Crewe, a price ostensibly arrived at using a dartboard and a quart of amyl nitrate. Avanti's first class Interrail game is good: comfy seats and free tasty things on board, as well as access to their first class lounges. It's a luxury I can only justify with an Interrail pass, and it saves the hassle of transferring to Paddington on the Underground. Leave ten minutes for the walk from Saint Pancras to Euston. Perhaps another twenty for snacks.
Transport for Wales does a lovely first class, and while it was horribly delayed, the lovely young man in charge of first kept me topped up with tea and biscuits while we waited. This was most civilised. The first class fare from Crewe to Leominster was 53,55€ when I looked, or forty-six of your finest British pounds.
James
I was so disappointed this journey didn't go as planned. It was going to be a two-day bonanza of trains from Leominster to Córdoba, with glamorous night trains and beige leather seats on one of Trenitalia's Fanny-Magnet Red rocket trains. I had a spreadsheet and everything.
The Leominster to Crewe fare, when I looked, was 29,88€. The fare from Crewe to London on the day I made the reservation – seven days before travel – was 163,61€. Not interestingly, had I booked the whole journey through the Transport for Wales web site, I'd have paid 277€. Go figure. There was time for a coffee and a forage in the lounge in Crewe.
The ill-fated Eurostar reservation was again 40€, instead of 211€. I made it nine days before travel, along with the reservation for the night train to Toulouse that never was. I chose a nice solo window seat and changed my meal preferences.
I only knew when I got to London that my Eurostar had been cancelled, and so changed my return plans from the kitsch embrace of my velour-curtained boudoir, travelling to Limoges from Paris a day later than planned – burning up the third travel day of my pass and rendering the fourth somewhat impotent in the process. My spreadsheet wept. I'd have paid 61€ for the last-minute ticket to Limoges, but instead paid only the 20€ reservation fee. The Eurostar train change was free in the app.
Even before things started to go wrong, I'd made a significant saving by sacrificing an Interrail pass rather than by buying point-to-point tickets. Had I bought tickets on the days I made my reservations, I'd have paid a total of 1129,70€ for them.
Using an Interrail pass, I paid 110€ on top of the cost of the pass: 397€ in total.
The travel days that weren't.
My original plans were to take the night train from Paris to Toulouse after the Eurostar, followed by an Intercités to Narbonne, an Ave to Madrid, and an Iryo(oh) to Córdoba the following day. I was very annoyed I didn't get to go on the night train, as I'd snagged an upper bunk in a first-class four-berth couchette compartment.
This is what I'd planned:
- A night train to Toulouse (arrive 07:44) with an upper bunk in a four-berth first-class couchette and a Bloody Mary with some exotic-flavoured crisps: 25€ instead of 205€;
- Shower and a coffee in the station at Toulouse, ideally in that order;
- 08:46 Intercités to Narbonne (10€ instead of 25€);
- 10:34 AVE International to Madrid (13€ instead of 209€);
- ¡Cerveza, por favor!;
- 16:55 Iryo – the new kid on the Interrail block – to Córdoba. 15€ instead of 78.64€.
This is where my planning stopped.
From Córdoba, I'd intended to buy a regular ticket to travel to Seville, where a week of warm-weather remote-working would have kept me entertained before a triumphant final travel day to Donostia via Zaragoza.
The current fare for Seville to Donostia a week on Friday is 156,90€. Please join me in a minute's silence.
My biggest disappointment was not getting to have a go in first class on the Iryo between Madrid and Córdoba. Iryo is a new addition to the Interrail network, and the last time I checked with their customer services people, they weren't even aware of that. I bought my reservation through the Interrail site, and was looking forward to the ride.
Raileurope refunded 100% of the SNCF reservations and 70% for the seat on the AVE. I received a 65% refund from Iryo.