10 tips for travelling on a Eurail Pass

10 tips for travelling on a Eurail Pass

by Audrey  / 

This past summer I spent 2 months travelling around Europe with a Eurail pass, where I took a total of 12 trains through 8 cities and 7 different countries. Over the course of the trip I rode a mix of high-speed trains and regional trains, I sat in crowded trains and empty trains, and I even missed a few tight connections.

Travelling by train proved to be a really fun way to see Europe, however, I also picked up a few tips and tricks after having a couple of train mishaps along the way. For anyone thinking of seeing Europe with a Eurail pass, here are a few things to keep in mind:

The Rail Planner app is your best friend

What I loved about this app is that it downloads all the train schedules on to your phone so that you can access them offline. It’s perfect for planning your travels on the go and making alternate plans to catch a later train if you missed a tight connection. Also, the app allows you to filter your rail options based on: direct connections only, trains without a compulsory reservation, and trains with a bicycle carriage. Super handy!

Don’t forget to validate your Eurail pass

Your Eurail pass needs to be validated at a train station before you can start using it, and you want to give yourself plenty of time to do so. Don’t try validating your pass on a Sunday morning in small-town Germany when they run on restricted schedules…your train may leave before the office even opens!

Take extra care filling out your pass

It’s also really important that you fill out your pass every time you start a leg of your journey. Because the Eurail pass gives you a specific number of travel days within a certain time frame, if one of the train officials catches you with an incomplete pass, they’ll think you’re trying to squeeze some free travel days. Same goes if you make a mistake filling out your pass; if you try to change your mistake, this will look like tampering. You must fill out your pass in ink, and you want to be really careful since any errors could result in a lost travel day.

Be aware that some trains require reservations

Yes, even with your Eurail pass, some of the high speed trains and overnight trains require that you make a reservation ahead of time. You can check this on the Rail Planner app when you plot your route – trains requiring a reservation will be market with an ‘R’. Additional reservation fees and surcharges apply to these trains on top of the cost of your pass.

Consider taking the regional trains to save money

If you don’t want to pay additional fees to travel on certain high speed trains, and if you have time to spare, you can always opt for the regional trains that travel at a slower speed and make more frequent stops along the way. It may take you twice or thrice as long to reach your destination, but it’s a good opportunity to enjoy the scenery or read a book.

When I was travelling from Luxembourg to Paris, I had the option of taking the regional trains which would get me to Paris in 6 hours, or taking a direct high speed train that would have me there in 2 hours. Since the later required paying an additional fee, I opted to take the slower train and catch up on some work instead.

Know when to bite the bullet and pay out of pocket

Travelling on the regional trains may save you money, but if you need to cover a lengthy distance and you don’t want to spend 2 days stuck on a train, you’ll have to pay out of pocket to upgrade to the faster trains.

As an example, I needed to get from Paris to Madrid in a day. When I filtered the routes avoiding trains requiring a reservation, I found that the journey would take anywhere between 44-55 hours – I couldn’t do that. However, if I was willing to upgrade to trains requiring a reservation, I could cut my travel time down to 10 hours. Sometimes it’s worth paying out of pocket.

Need reservations? Make them well in advance

Train travel is a popular way to see Europe, and during the summer months certain routes can fill up. You don’t want to show up at the station a few hours before catching an overnight train from say Prague to Amsterdam, only to discover that there are no seats available. If you’re planning to travel on a route that requires a reservation, book it as soon as you have concrete travel plans.

Sometimes it’s worth missing a tight connection

If there’s one thing that stressed me out about train travel, it was the tight connections. I travelled on routes that gave me as little as 12 minutes to haul all my luggage off one train, check the timetable for my next connection, run halfway across the station to find the next platform, weave my way through a mass of people, and then haul my luggage onto the next train. That’s enough to make you break out into a mild panic!

That’s why I decided that sometimes it’s best to just miss that tight connection and catch the one leaving after that. If it’s a popular route, the next train may leave within the hour or sooner, which gives you plenty of time to grab a snack, go to the washroom, and find your way without feeling rushed.

Choose your pass carefully

I had a Global Pass that gave me 15 days of travel within a 2 month window, and it also gave me the freedom to travel through 28 countries. However, looking back, I hardly made use of all those available travel days! Before you get a pass, think about where you want to go, and then decide if you really need the Global Pass or if a One Country Pass or a Select Pass (that covers 2-4 neighbouring countries) would be more efficient and wallet-friendly.

Lastly, bring snacks on board!

I don’t know about you, but I like to snack all day long (it’s what keeps ‘hanger’ at bay). However, what I found was that not all trains sell food onboard. This is especially true of regional trains, so if you have a long travel day ahead of you, it’s best you bring a few snacks on board.

10 Smart Ways to Save Money on Travel

Written by Ashlea Halpern

Getty

Embrace the "second city," such as Busan, South Korea instead of Seoul

Make your New Year's resolution to travel more a reality with these tips.

You probably already know that Tuesday and Wednesday are the cheapest days to fly—even more so if it’s the off season. You already have got fare alerts set up through Airfarewatchdog, a prioritized Facebook follow on Secret Flying, and a bookmarks tab glutted with third-party booking sites. And yet, you could be doing so much more. Here are a few other ways that you can stretch your travel bucks.

GO WHERE THE US DOLLAR IS THE STRONGEST.

This is a no-brainer. Right now, $1 USD is worth $1.43 in Canada. So why aren’t we all on planes to Toronto? (Oh, that’s right: winter.) Currencies in Japan, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, Australia, Argentina, Thailand, Sweden, Russia, and South Africa all represent favorable exchanges for Americans right now. But remember—just because a local economy has tanked doesn’t mean the cost of goods and services went with it. International hoteliers, for instance, often increase their rates to cover a drop in value. In these cases, it pays to look closely at mom-and-pop operators.

SHOW THAT ATM WHO’S BOSS.

If you travel frequently, set up an online debit/checking account through Charles Schwab Bank. There are no monthly service fees and no ATM withdrawal fees anywhere in the world. And get this: Schwab will even reimburse you at the end of every cycle for ATM fees charged by outside vendors. Pretty sweet.

INVEST IN A PHONE PLAN THAT TRAVELS WITH YOU.

Why futz around with SIM cards or rack up exorbitant roaming fees when you can just “internationalize” your phone plan? As an avid traveler, I swear by T-Mobile’s Simple Choice Plan. I pay a modest monthly rate to get normal usage of my phone in the States, plus free international data and text messaging in more than 140 countries. Phone calls abroad cost 20 cents a minute, but I usually save those for Skype, which is zero cents a minute when dialing another Skype user. With T-Mobile, there’s no million-year contract to sign nor hidden fees, and the overseas service is reliable enough—rarely 4G or LTE, more often 3G or 2G, and occasionally the dreaded E. (But whatever, E is still better than the alternative, which is dragging around a city looking for WiFi to steal.)

EARN YOURSELF SOME TRAVEL POINTS.

If you like travel but aren’t using a traveler-centric credit card, you’re going to be in a world of pain when you learn about the freebies you’ve been passing up. Without getting too nerdy with numbers, your goal is to find a card with a large sign-up bonus, no foreign transaction fees, trip cancellation/interruption insurance, and good rental car coverage. Chase Sapphire Preferred is my favorite; we earned 50,000 points for spending $4,000 in the first three months and continue to earn double the points on travel and dining (and one point for every dollar spent on everything else). How does it pay out? We recently flew Qantas from L.A. to Melbourne for free, so I’d say pretty well. It’s not the only card out there, though; traveler friends of mine also swear by the Capital One Venture Rewards Card, Barclay Arrival Plus Card, and Citi ThankYou Premier Card. To compare perks, fees, and other minutiae in the land of plastic, check out CreditCards.com.

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ENTER THE MATRIX.

Chances are you’re probably already using Kayak and Google Flights to zero in on the best fare for a specific route—or see where you could possibly go based on your budget and schedule. ITA Matrix is the MIT-developed software that powers both of those search engines. And while you can’t book tickets directly through it, the easy user interface is probably the most powerful tool on the internet for unearthing the greatest variety of fares, including from no-name budget carriers you won’t find on behemoths like Orbitz and Expedia.

THINK OUTSIDE THE ROUND-TRIP BOX.

While you’re poking around Kayak, keep your eyes peeled for so-called “hacker fares,” which cobble together two one-way flights—often operated by separate airlines or originating from different airports—in lieu of a pricier round trip fare. Skiplagged is a popular app for searching one-way combos, as well as hidden-city ticketing—that thing where you book a cheaper flight from point A to point C with a layover in point B, then just disembark at point B because that’s where you wanted to fly in the first place.

SHOP THROUGH A PORTAL.

If you don’t have miles-or points-accruing portals like Delta’s SkyMiles Shopping, JetBlue's ShopTrue, or Chase’s Ultimate Rewards saved in your browser, you might as well withdraw all of your money from the nearest ATM and set it on fire. To get these valuable payouts, all you have to do is click through the portal to a list of participating shops (Apple, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Sephora, etc.) and it’ll redirect you to the brand’s official website—all while tracking your purchase and rewarding you with a set number of points or miles per dollar spent. Win-win.

PICK UP THE PHONE.

I know, I know—it’s painful. Who wants to talk to a real, live human being when you can hide behind a keyboard? But calling the property directly can land you spectacular last-minute hotel deals you won’t find online, especially as more brands offer incentives for direct booking.

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EMBRACE THE “SECOND CITY.”

Hamburg, not Berlin. Busan, not Seoul. Pittsburgh, not Philadelphia. The goal is to go where all of the other tourists aren’t—and reap savings because of it. Not only do hotels, transportation, and the cost of goods and services tend to be lower outside of the biggest city, the locals are sometimes tickled that you’re even there. Though we loved exploring Taipei last year, Kaohsiung was a real trip because so many people did a double-take wherever we went, like, “Whoa, how’d you get here?”

STOP AMASSING, START TRAVELING.

You have enough stuff. What you should be asking for on birthdays, holidays, and other celebrations that require the people you love to shower you with gifts that are experiences—specifically, gift certificates that count toward experiences, like those from Hotels.com, Airbnb, Rail Europe, and high-end tour operators such as Abercrombie & Kent and Cox & Kings. Passes are another smart thing to request—a CityPASS booklet grants you discounted access to the biggest tourist attractions in a dozen North American cities, while an annual National Park Service Pass is the perfect thing for an outdoorsy road-tripping type. Alternatively, you could set up a vacation drive on a personal-fundraising site like GoFundMe, though that might be interpreted by some friends and family as a little gauche. (It helps if you're traveling for altruistic purposes.) If all else fails, there’s always travel-themed stuff, obtainable with a generous gift card from Flight 001 or Magellan's.

I’ve been waiting for a product like this for some time.

We all know that there are various “make money loopholes” or “push button software’s” available to buy that have the ability to generate you money online, but there’s nothing better than a proven strategy that works. A detailed step by step guide which takes you from struggling to make a cent, to earning commission on autopilot for months on end.

Google Sniper by George Brown is exactly that, and it’s a system that will take you through finding a niche, discovering high volume targeted keywords, picking a product to promote to setting up your wordpress site and getting in indexed by Google. It really is the most foolproof system available.

Not only is it a well taught course anyone can learn, the strategy actually kicks ass! It takes you on average about 2-4 hours to create a Sniper site, and this includes everything from researching a niche to finding a product to promote (if you follow the steps correctly). After this, it really is all systems go…

As people we all value time over money right? Well a strategy that generates you a good deal of money but takes you 16 hours a day to operate isn’t a good one. Yes you’ll make money, but you won’t have any time to enjoy that money. But Google Sniper really makes you commission on autopilot. It takes on average 2-4 hours to set up, and then you simply can just relax. Why?

There’s no traffic generation involved!

● No PPC
● No Link Building
● No Social Media – No Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or anything or that sort
● No CPA
● No More Spending Time On Months Of Content Either…

It’s an awesome strategy, and it’s easy to learn.

Google Sniper really is a must for anyone looking to make money online. The 104-page eBook guides you through the process, and is reinforced by the step-by-step walkthrough videos. The monthly option of Sniper X also keeps everything up to date, and gives you even more strategies and tactics to make more money from your sniper sites. But that choice is optional…

So with more success stories generated than any other make money online strategy? It’s a no brainer; check it out here 

Top 5 things to do in Yangon

By Alastair Donnelly on Nov 07, 2015 in Accommodation, Asia, Attractions, Cruises & Boat Travel, Food and Drink, Going Out, Hotels, Leisure Travel, Myanmar, Rail Travel, Regions, Restaurants, Speciality Travel, Travel Miscellany   

If you’re heading to Burma, the chances are that you’ll be beginning your trip in Yangon: Burma’s former capital city and former stronghold of the British Raj. Though it is by far the largest city in Burma, Yangon remains much quieter and less developed than most Southeast Asian capitals. It has only 5 million residents as opposed to neighbouring Bangkok’s 22 million, and its crumbling colonial buildings have been left largely untouched for decades.

Yangon’s attractions range from ancient religious monuments to faded colonial grandeur and include both fascinating markets and pleasant suburbs. But where to begin?

1. Visit Shwedagon Pagoda

If you know nothing else about Yangon, you may well have heard of Shwedagon Pagoda: Burma’s holiest (and shiniest) religious monument. The Burmese claim that this 100-metre-plus, burnished gold stupa has stood on this spot for over 2,500 years, making Shwedagon the oldest pagoda in the world. This probably not entirely true, however. Historians put the age of the pagoda at around 1,000-1,400 years, but who’s counting anyway?

Shwedagon is not just a place of worship, but a hub where Yangon residents congregate to socialise, particularly in the evenings. This gives the stupa a lively, buzzing atmosphere rather than the hush-hush, museum-like experience you can sometimes find at “must-see” temples.

2. Take a sunset cruise on the Yangon River

After a long day of sightseeing, you probably feel as though you’d like to sit back, put your feet up, and watch the world go by. A novel way to do this in Yangon is on a sunset river cruise, where you can get a different perspective on the city while enjoying a beer or two. This is our preferred way to end a day in Yangon.

3. Head out of the city on a bicycle

We all enjoy seeing the famous sights in any city – but most of us also like to get a sense of everyday life away from the tourist trail. This can be a tall order when you’re pushed for time and don’t know the area, but exploring by bicycle is a fantastic way to get a taste of both.

There are a number of excellent bike rides to take in Yangon, leading you out of the city centre and into quiet suburbs and neighbouring villages that you might otherwise never have discovered. One of our favourite routes takes you across the Yangon River by ferry to Dhala, then through paddy fields, bamboo groves and stilt villages to the town of Twante.

4. Take high tea at the Strand Hotel

Thanks to Yangon’s relative lack of development, the city still boasts and impressive hoard of grand colonial architecture. Faded and crumbling as they are, these buildings have been left largely un-meddled-with, giving them an air of authenticity that has been lost from some parts of postcolonial Southeast Asia.

The best way to take in this impressive heritage is to take a walking tour of the city, including a stop at the historic Strand Hotel for high tea. Built in 1901, the Strand has been hosting VIPs and dignitaries for over a century, and is the perfect place to rekindle a little colonial romance.

5. Ride the circle train

If you want to get an idea of the average Yangon-dweller’s day-to-day life, we highly recommend riding the circle train out into the suburbs. Hop off at a few stops here and there and just take a bit of time to wander aimlessly – discovering quiet streets and busy markets without another tourist in sight. If you can, enlist the services of a local guide to show you where the best spots are and introduce you to Burmese culture.

These are our five favourite Yangon tips for the first-time visitor, and should make the perfect introduction to any Burma trip.

Alastair Donnelly is Director at InsideAsia Tours.