Winterrail: Doing the sums
Financially responsible rail hedonism, with receipts.
It's Saturday, it's sunny, and I'm inside looking at a spreadsheet which tells me something that people probably already know: judicious use of Interrail passes can save a small fortune on international rail travel.
There is some thought and planning involved, particularly for travel in France and Spain, but it is worth it.
The four-day pass I used for this journey was purchased during the Black Friday/Winter sale on the Interrail site at the end of November for 269€.
tl;dr
Use an Interrail pass, save a grand. Use one, really. Save money. Have more money for wine.
James
This is the leg where I committed first to travelling on Eurostar and Avanti, about two weeks in advance, because I was confident about my travel dates and know that Eurostar rewards decisiveness and punishes whimsy.
Via Lille is my preferred route, because it requires the least effort. In theory a TGV from Angoulême to Lille Flandres should get in at 10:46 and work nicely with the 13:35 Eurostar from Lille Europe, but you need to book way in advance as that particular Eurostar seems to lose its pass-holder allocation quite quickly. So I was forced to go via Paris.
Paris Montparnasse-Maquis-de-Sade is not my favourite railway station. I actively avoid it wherever possible to preserve my will to live, but it was inevitable this time. My preferred alternative is Austerlitz, because it's civilised and the transfer to the Gare du Nord on the métro (line 5) is quick and painless. Sadly, engineering works between Toulouse and Paris during December put paid to that, so I packed some masks and permethrin cream and braced myself for métro line 4.
When I booked the TGV from Bordeaux to Paris, a week before travel, the first class fare was 64€. I paid 10€ for my seat reservation. Ker-ching! This is a recurring theme; tune out now if it's already too nerdy.
A one-way journey from Paris to London in Eurostar Plus was listed as 247€ when I made the reservation for 40€ on 27th November. This included food, and you can claim Club Eurostar points on the cost of the seat reservation.
For onward travel from Euston, I made a reservation on the 15:33 Avanti service to Manchester – partly to maintain standards, and partly so I could continue my long-running and so far unsuccessful quest to sample Transport for Wales’ First Class dining experience. The full fare was 134€; the seat reservation, gloriously free – as were all the ingredients for a Bloody Mary on-board.
First on Avanti comes with all sorts of perks: lounge access with cake-on-demand at both departure and destination, plus complimentary food and drinks on board.
Transport for Wales do not require seat reservations. The fare from Manchester to Leominster, when I looked, was 42€. There was no chef on board and so TfW's First Class dining continues to evade me, but I suppose this was something of a silver lining. As I'd grazed plentifully along the route from Paris, an actual three-course meal would probably have made me ill.
James
The return trip was all booked quite last minute.
After two weeks of festive family fun, I determined it was time to plan my escape and, rather than stab someone, instead take a metaphorical stab at completing my aborted trip to Córdoba of November.
I made the 40€ Eurostar seat reservation six days before departure, when Eurostar Plus to Paris was showing at 158€. On the same day, I booked an upper bunk in a couchette compartment of four on the 22:13 Intercités de Nuit from Paris Austerlitz to Toulouse for 20€ via RailEurope. A standard first class ticket would have been 98€. The Tarif Flex Première – the closest equivalent in terms of ticket flexibility – was a whopping 214€.
Sleeping on a train can be quite economical.
James
By this point I was growing confident in my lackadaisical approach to Interrail seat reservations. I'd been quietly checking seat availability in the days before departure and knew that I could afford to be a bit relaxed with the bookings. So relaxed had I become, in fact, that I only booked these the day before on the Avanti service from Crewe to Euston, while triumphantly supping a Bloody Mary and grazing on noisy crisps.
The Intercités from Toulouse to Narbonne had a seat in first listed at 43€ when I booked, but my reservation was 20€. I could have taken a TER on that route for free, but that would have meant missing out on a nice hot shower and a caffeine fix in the Salon Intercités de Nuit at the station in Toulouse. Some luxuries are non-negotiable.
The AVE International from Narbonne to Barcelona was showing a first-class fare of 55€ when I booked, but my seat reservation was only 13€. If you’re going to engineer savings of this magnitude, it feels only right to reinvest some of them immediately in food, and so the onward post-prandial Renfe service to Córdoba – after a cultural lunch next to the Sagrada Familia – cost only 13€, instead of the full fare of 120.20€.
James
This was the last day of validity for my Interrail pass, and I was determined to squeeze every last centime of value out of it. There were many options, but I decided to go from Córdoba via Zaragoza, instead of Madrid, to make for an easier change and to have first class all the way, rather than only on the first leg.
I had been rather keen to try the Iryo from Córdoba, but there was a half-hour change between trains in Zaragoza, and the onward 16:36 was the last train to Donostia, so any disruption would've scuppered that. With the benefit of hindsight I now know that my concerns were ill-founded, and I'd have made the connection easily without having to spend two hours in an air-cooled, egg-scented concrete bunker.
This knowledge will be useful to me next time.
Neither RailEurope or Happyrail were cooperating the night before, so I eventually aborted all attempts at using life-easiering technology and resolved to do things the old-fashioned way: by walking to the station to talk to an actual human.
First port of call was the Iryo office where I tried buying a pass-holder seat reservation, but was looked at quite blankly by their staff, unable to grasp that they didn't need access to the Interrail system to sell me a ticket using theirs. After several circular exchanges, it became clear that I might not have been talking to a human after all, and that nothing productive was going to be achieved.
In contrast, the woman in the Renfe office next door was charming and patient, and forcefully determined to make the computer do what she wanted: allocate me window seats.
Renfe: 1 - Iryo: 0
My Prémium seat reservation on the 10:17 from Córdoba to Zaragoza cost 24.80€ and came with a free snackbox breakfast and a glass of cava. This is, objectively, quite a lot of money for two complimentary sandwiches and a hot drink, but significantly less than the 166.25€ full fare, and probably worth the 15€ premium over the normal first class reservation to have a glass of cava brought to your seat while everyone else looks on in envy.
I now own some Renfe paper coasters.
The onward train to Donostia cost only 10.55€ in reservation fees, a healthy saving on the 46.80€ full fare. At this point the pass had more than paid for itself, and I was feeling smug, knowing that I had a spreadsheet to prove it.
I got an actual paper ticket. This made me feel important.
James
For completeness, the journey from Hendaye to Périgueux is listed at 61€ on the SNCF web site, but my Poor Person's Railcard brings that down significantly to much more palatable 12.30€.
Fun fact: There is no advantage in taking a TGV between Hendaye and Bordeaux because they share the same speed limits as the TER. Save your money.
The Euskotren between Donostia Amara and Hendaia costs 2.90€.
Woohoo! Sums! 🥳
The damage?
The total cost of point-to-point tickets, if bought on the day I made my seat reservations, comes to 1,357.02€. I paid a total of 191.35€ in seat reservation fees.
Plus the cost of the pass, Interrail saved me just short of a grand; that's a lot of pintxos and wine.
The Interrail legs of this journey totalled 4,565km, which answers the question I asked at Easter last year: How far is it possible to travel using a four-day Interrail pass? This trip was about 1,000km longer than than that journey.
I reckon I can do better than that.