Interrail Pass > Reviews > It's the journey, not the destination.

Author's product rating:   

Frequency of trains	Excellent
Reliability of trains	Mostly on time
Comfort of trains	Comfortable
On-board facilities	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Cheap, flexible, a great experience !
Disadvantages:	Some hidden costs, does not cover home country .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

If you just want a holiday sitting by the pool in one place, you'll be better off with one of the budget airlines. But if you want to visit a lot of places in a short time, read on - Interrail is a great way to achieve a low-budget, high-intensity travel experience.

THE EXPERIENCE:
I spent a month Interrailing round Europe with a friend during one summer at uni. In that time I visited about 10 towns and cities in 8 different countries, and travelled through several more. We shared train compartments with Spaniards, New Zealanders, Canadians, Bulgarian football fans, and four generations of a Romanian family. A Mexican student taught my friend to play the bongo drums, and we spent three hours drinking local beer in a thunderstorm at Bucharest station, with some Dutch people who had missed the same train as us. We got turfed out of our bunks at 4am to have our passports stamped on the Bulgarian border, even though we weren't stopping in the country, and we were once left without a train, passports, or a comprehensible explanation for an hour or so, somewhere in the back of beyond on the Greek-Turkish border, because neither country will allow the other's trains to cross over. I fell asleep on the floor in Frankfurt station, and some more Dutch people demonstrated to us the difference between English with a Dutch accent, English with a German accent, and English with no discernible accent at all. (We met a lot of Dutch people everywhere we went, except Holland. It seems they all have a mass exodus over the summer and go off to travel the world. Dutch people are very nice, but all speak about 5 languages completely fluently and make us Brits feel very stupid.)

This is what I mean by a travel experience. We had a good time in the places we actually stopped in too, of course, but the travelling itself is a very major part of an Interrail trip.

PLANNING:
It's great, but it can be tiring if you try to go too fast. It's worth having a rough itinerary to make sure you see everything you want to and have enough time to rest between gruelling sightseeing expeditions and overnight journeys. We had about 3 or 4 days per stop, and I would recommend this as a minimum. Don't put too much effort into planning though, because the wonderful thing is that it's completely flexible, so if you like a place you can stay longer, if you don't, you can leave, and if you change your mind completely you can just scrap the plan and go somewhere else. Do bear in mind too, that things can go wrong and change your plans for you. Make them flexible in the first place and this won't matter!

We went in the middle of summer. This may be the most practical time for most people, but it's also the most crowded, and far, far too hot, in my opinion. (In Athens, we managed to see the Parthenon, but then expired, lay in the shade under a tree for the rest of the day, and left the next morning.) I'd recommend avoiding peak season and aiming for spring or autumn instead.

The pass does NOT cover your home country, so if you're going to be paying a bit to get to the border where the pass comes into effect anyway, you probably might as well skip straight to the first place you actually want to visit. I didn't think this through and we got the ferry over to France and travelled the whole way overland. In hindsight it would have saved some time and been much cheaper to get a flight straight to Italy, since we we'd seen plenty of France before, and you can get flights for next to nothing these days. (I recently flew to the south of France for £1!)
Oh, and if you're not from Europe, you'll need a Eurail pass, not Interrail.

If you haven't booked anywhere to stay in advance, do try to arrive at your next stop in the morning or early afternoon. It once took us several hours to find a hotel, which was a damn nuisance, but at least it wasn't the middle of the night! We mostly stayed in youth hostels - they're a great way to meet fellow travellers, you don't have to be a member to use most of them, and they're cheap. (It is probably worth having YHA membership anyway, as you get discounts, and I think we did come across one place that only allowed members to stay.) You can usually book ahead from one hostel to another, which saves wandering around looking for somewhere. This is useful, particularly at peak season, but not absolutely necessary. Sometimes it can even be cheaper to look for a hotel when you arrive, particularly if there are a couple of you sharing a room.

Buy the pass a few weeks in advance, just to be on the safe side. But if I remember right, it's easy - we got ours from the nearest major train station, and you can probably get them direct from Interrail too. I'm not sure what happens if you lose it, but I suggest you don't! I found a money belt very useful!

THE TRAINS:
We generally found it pretty easy to get where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go there. But the conditions on the trains themselves vary quite a bit from country to country. Amazingly, I think the only train I was on that arrived late was in Germany. So much for that stereotype. This is not to say that the trains were faster or better elsewhere - it's just that they acknowledge that they are slow and crowded and factor it in to the timetables. On one train in Greece, for example, we seemed to travel for several decades at approximately the pace of a geriatric snail, with so many people crammed into the aisles that I seriously doubt it was physically possible for anyone to leave their place. Fortunately we were going to the end of the line. I can only assume everyone else was, too... Either way, we got there early.

Some of the trains in France and Germany were shiny new express things with frighteningly overpriced food and soundproof double glazing. But most of the time we were in old style carriages with compartments (which tend to promote more conversation between strangers), openable windows, and whatever food and drink we brought with us. It's worth taking your own toilet paper too! These trains may seem a bit dilapidated, but on the whole I liked them much better than the new ones.
When travelling overnight I would recommend a couchette every time (a bunk in a compartment shared with other passengers). This is much cheaper than an individual cabin, and a huge improvement over trying to sleep in a seat!
If you're worried about the safety of travelling in a compartment or couchette, I can only say that as two girls travelling alone, we never had reason to feel worried. A drunk bloke once threw up in our compartment, so we moved to another one. Other than that, people were generally very nice.

COSTS:
You can find out the exact costs for various times and zones for yourself, but it varies from about £100 to £400, depending on your age, how long the pass lasts (16 days - 1 month) and how much of Europe it covers. It is pretty much universally recognised, though we did of course have to pay separately for the odd ferry or bus journey, where trains couldn't take us. (Apparently the pass does give you some discounts on ferries, but we didn't come across any that I remember.)

There are some extra costs along the way - mostly supplements on some express trains in Northern Europe and charges for sleeper compartments or couchettes. These are annoying if you're not expecting them, but they're usually only a few quid, and the pass is still very good value for money. Travelling overnight also saves the cost of somewhere to stay, so it is worth doing.

As a general guide, I think I spent about £1000 grand total in the month I spent travelling round Europe, including accomodation, sightseeing, transport, food, visas, souvenirs, and everything. About £250 of that was on the pass. You could probably get by with spending quite a bit less than I did on iced coffee and pastries though!