Interrail Top Tips: Updated for 2025
January 27th, 2025

Going Interrailing is a great way to explore Europe. You get the freedom to plan your own route and have a flight-free, guilt-free holiday, earning you the right to tågskryt (a Swedish term meaning to train brag, which can be translated as to take pride in taking the train).
It takes a bit of forward planning to get the most out of an Interrail pass, which is why I wrote Going Flight-Free: Exploring Europe by Train sharing our top tips from our 2022 Interrail adventure.
We went Interrailing again in September 2024 and picked up a few more insights that made our trip even more enjoyable. Here’s what I learned from our latest Interrail trip.
Outbound & Inbound Travel Days
Travel on British trains is included in an Interrail pass on your first and last days of travel. This means you get free train travel from and to anywhere in the UK to and from St Pancras Station to catch the Eurostar. Given that it can cost £75 one-way from our local station to London, having the UK part of the journey included in a pass is a significant saving.
Booking Eurostar Seats
Eurostar tickets for travel in and out of the UK are included in an Interrail pass, but you do have to pay 30 Euros to reserve a seat. A change since our last trip is that it’s now possible to book seat reservations in one place using the Rail Europe website. This made life simpler and saved us a lot of time.
Reserving Seats in France & Italy
In most countries you can hop on any train with your Interrail pass for free without having to reserve a seat, which is what we did in Switzerland and Belgium. However, in Italy and France the rules are slightly different and it is compulsory to have a seat reservation on some trains, usually intercity ones such as Trenitalia and TGV, with no reservations needed on regional trains. The Journey Planner in the Interrail app will tell you if a reservation is required on a particular route.
As mentioned above, you can use Rail Europe to make seat reservations on trains in any country. This is so much quicker than having to go to multiple train company websites or queue up and buy them at a station, which is what we did in the past. The ticket will be emailed to you and you just have to show the digital ticket on your phone in order to board (no need to print a paper copy).
However, we did discover that Rail Europe appears to have a limited number of spaces on each route. Even though we were booking more than a week in advance to travel from Verona to Turin, there were no seats left with Rail Europe. I tried to book directly with Trenitalia, but apparently there is a long-term glitch with their website so it’s impossible to enter an Interrail pass number. I sought help on the Community Forum where I discovered you can use the Austrian railways website to make seat reservations in other countries. This was a really handy piece of advice. It’s worth noting that the Austrian railways ticket says it needs to be printed, but in reality a digital copy is fine – ours were accepted at each inspection.
The Interrail App
Your Interrail pass is stored in the app and you need to activate a journey and link it to your pass when you travel. On our trip in 2022 we found the app clunky and difficult to use. However, this time it worked better. For example, if you accidentally activate the wrong journey, it’s now easy to remove it (whereas previously there was no function to cancel if you make a mistake).
The app is not entirely up-to-date with train timetables. We found the Deutsche Bahn website was more reliable when planning which train to catch than the Journey Planner in the app. In a couple of cases the train we caught wasn’t in the Journey Planner at all, but the app does allow you to manually add the details of the train you are on.
Route Planning
On our 2022 European trip we visited nine countries and fitted a lot into our schedule. This was fun but it did mean we didn’t spend as much time as we would have liked in some places, and we had some really long train journeys.
This time we decided to spend longer in each place and visit fewer countries (Switzerland, Italy, France and Belgium). I’d recommend this approach as it meant we had more time to relax and explore each place we visited. Of course, you don’t know how long you’ll want to stay somewhere until you’re there. There were a couple of places that were stopovers en route that we would have liked more time to explore (Turin and Lyon in particular).
This time, in addition to reading the trusty Lonely Planets and Rough Guides, we used YouTube videos to plan where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do.
Accommodation
We booked all our accommodation in advance using Booking.com, which reduced stress because we knew we had somewhere to sleep each night and didn’t have to spend time while we were away working out where to stay. We stayed in a mix of Airbnbs and hotels. As well as price, the main criteria we used to choose accommodation was proximity to the main sights and to the train station, using Google Maps and reviews to help.
Since getting back I read this article about alternatives to Booking.com and plan to check out some of the recommendations for our next trip.
Going Interrailing is a really fun thing to do at any age and I hope this and my previous post help you plan your own European train adventures. We travelled on a Global Pass that was valid for a month, but there are several different options available depending on your timeframe and budget, including family passes. You can get more information here and keep an eye out for special offers, such as 10% or 20% discounts. We are lucky to have Europe on our doorstep and to be able to experience its diverse culture, history and geography by train without the emissions of flying.