Things to know before you go interrailing

What is Interrailing?

Interrailling essentially means travelling around Europe with an Interrail or Eurail pass. These are train tickets that allow you unlimited travel across many European countries in a given time frame or unlimited travel on a certain number of days in a given time period.

What is the difference between Interrrail and Eurail?

Not a lot really! They are essentially the same, they offer the same deals and time frames for the same price, the only difference is who can use them. Interrail tickets are for European citizens and Eurail tickets are for non-European citizens.

What are the different types of passes?

There are lots of variations of interrail passes ranging from one-country passes to ‘global’ passes (which cover most countries in Europe – not actually global!). Then there are also variations on time frames. There are unlimited travel passes which means you can travel on as many days as you like within 15 days, 22 days, 1 month, 2 months or 3 months.

There are also slightly cheaper options which restrict your travel to only a certain number of days within a time period, eg. 7 days within 1 month (which is apparently the most popular option). This pass means you can travel on 7 different days within a one month period – but that doesn’t necessarily mean just 7 trains. For example you could travel from Florence to Pisa in the morning, spend a few hours in Pisa then get a train to Rome in the evening. If this is all within the same day that counts as one of your seven travel days.

I would highly recommend creating a rough plan of your route before buying your ticket and then figuring out which would be the best value for you. If you’re not one for planning then buying an unlimited travel global pass is probably best as this gives you the most flexibility! Also, if you want to travel on 8 or 9 days within a month, check how much some of those individual trains cost – it could work out cheaper to buy one or two additional train tickets rather than upgrading to an unlimited travel pass.

How much does it cost to go interrailing?

This is a big question and can obviously vary a lot depending on how long you go for, where you go and how much you like to spend. The interrail passes themselves range from €185 for 4 travel days within a month to €677 for unlimited travel over three months. The most popular pass, 7 travel days within a month is €251. These are the prices for youths (under 28s), adult prices are slightly higher.

To give a rough idea, when I went interrailing in 2014, I bought the unlimited month pass, which is now €503. I travelled with my partner and we usually booked private hostel rooms so fairly low budget. We spent around £600 each on accommodation over 37 nights. I didn’t keep count of how much we spent day to day but we were fairly cheap! On a budget, our 5 weeks probably cost around £1,500 each. If you’re interested in low-cost travel, click here to read some of my top tips for travelling on a budget!

Which Countries are not included in an interrail pass?

The vast majority of European countries are accessible with your interrail pass. The ones that aren’t are mostly island nations, very small nations or in the far East of Europe.

The full list of European countries not included are: Andorra, Belarus, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Russia, San Marino and Ukraine

Top Tips

Get Insurance

Both travel insurance and interrail’s own pass protection, especially if you’re not getting a mobile pass. When I went interrailling mobile passes didn’t exist yet, so when we had almost all our valuable possessions stolen part-way through the trip (including tickets and passports), it was awful! To be fair, they also stole one of our phones, so perhaps a mobile pass wouldn’t have been much help either. Luckily we paid an extra £10 or so for pass protection. This allowed us to claim back the cost of additional train tickets or get a refund for the remaining time left on the pass – whichever is cheapest. Unfortunately we still lost a little money on this, the best option ending up being taking the refund and buying another pass. However, we did also get money back from our travel insurance provider too.

Use Ferries too!

As well as trains, the interrail pass is also valid on some ferry journeys and provides discounts on lots more too! Keep this in mind when planning your route. Sometimes it can be much quicker to cut across the sea rather than go over land. It also means you don’t need to rule out Greek islands or Finland, Norway and Sweden (although there is a bridge between Sweden and Denmark). Take a look on the interrail website to see all the ferry discounts available.

Double check if you need reservations

For certain trains, you need to book your seat in advance and pay a reservation fee, on top of your interrail pass. This is the case for the Eurostar and most sleeper trains. Trains across Italy, Spain, France and Greece often require reservations too. Reservations don’t cost too much, usually around €10.

It’s cheaper when you’re younger!

If you’re thinking about interrailing and you’re on the cusp of turning 28, go sooner rather than later. Interrail very generously class ‘youths’ as aged 17-27, so if you’re in that age bracket your ticket will be a little cheaper!

Lots of tourist attractions free for EU youth

Another perk to travelling when you’re younger is that lots of attractions are free too. If you’re aged between 18-25 and an EU citizen then lots of attractions will be open to you for free. These include the Louvre and the Arc De Triomphe in Paris. Unfortunately Brexit means UK citizens are no longer entitled to this perk!

Don’t let long train journeys put you off

Looking back on my interrail route now I was shocked to see some of our train journeys were 8 hours long! I don’t really remember sitting on trains for that long at all! Clearly they weren’t too bad, I think I just slept a lot of the time! If you can plan your route to break it up and have lots of smaller journeys with stops in between that might be best but if you need to do a few longer trips to get to the places you really want to see, don’t let this put you off at all!

You don’t need to spend the night in every stop

Some cities are very expensive, even for hostel rooms! But if somewhere isn’t within your budget that doesn’t mean you need to rule it out completely. We made a couple of stops, one in Switzerland and another in Belgium where we only visited for the day. We planned our trains to arrive fairly early in the morning and leave later in the day so we could spend as much time as we could exploring there before moving on to stay in a cheaper destination.

Plan for the places you want to spend most time in to be your first and last stop

Your interrail or eurail ticket doesn’t start counting down until your first train journey. So if you have a month pass you could easily extend your trip to 6 weeks by spending a week in your first and last stops. This is why I would highly recommend planning your route for your favourite destinations or the ones with the most sights to be your first and last. For us, this was Paris and Amsterdam.

Need Help Planning?

If you like to be super organised (like me!) or just need a little more planning help – take a look at our interrail planners and journals. These are notebooks specifically designed to help you plan your adventure across Europe!