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A Eurail Global Pass offers free travel for a certain number of days, but doesn't include seat reservations. Seat reservations can be made on raileurope.com (and their regional sister sites for Australia, Canada, and the rest of the world), but they charge a significant fee (can be around €10, often more than the reservation itself!) and can usually only send the reservation by mail, which is tricky if you're already travelling.

Where can I reserve seats to go with a Eurail pass, without the extra expense and inconvenience of booking through Rail Europe?

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  • I believe this is the official service: reservations.interrail.eu They do Eurail and Interail reservations. – skifans May 17 '17 at 7:20
  • Hi Saadia, I edited your question to make it clearer what you're asking and make this question suitable for re-opening. If you feel that my edit misrepresents your question, please feel free to roll it back. – Pont May 17 '17 at 7:56
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As ever for European train travel, The Man in Seat 61 is a good resource, specifically his guide to Eurail passes. He lists three options for making reservations without paying the Rail Europe fee:

  1. In person at the station, at the ticket counter or (in some countries) at an automated ticket machine.

  2. Using the Eurail Rail Planner App.

  3. Using the website of whichever national train operator is running the service. Details of how to do this differ between countries, and listing them all would make this answer enormous, but the linked Seat61 page has plenty of information and links organized by country. (Even without this guide, you can probably figure it out yourself after some digging around on the appropriate train operator site, but some are more user-friendly than others :) ).

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  • Many main railway stations in Europe have a ticket window or office for selling international tickets, there you can usually also make reservations for Eurail pass travels, including those in other participating countries. – Willeke♦ May 17 '17 at 15:40
  • I do recall making reservations for our entire trip at the Zurich central station. However, I've recently read somewhere that reservations quota for rail pass holders are now very limited. So I'm wondering if making these reservations a week before the intended date of travel will be a safe margin? I wouldn't want to book too much in advance to allow for some flexibility. – Saadia May 20 '17 at 16:16
  • @Saadia The Seat61 page I linked addresses this (see "Do I need to make reservations?"): apparently there are only four lines with a limited passholder quota. But if you're planning your exact itinerary in advance anyway, Eurail's probably a waste of money: it's likely to be cheaper to buy individual tickets for specific trips at discounted advance prices. The big advantage of a Eurail pass is huge flexibility, and you pay a big premium for this. If you don't need that, it's usually a poor choice. – Pont May 20 '17 at 17:36

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