Rail travel in Europe advance purchase · Advance Purchase in Rail travel in Europe
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Advance Purchase in Rail travel in Europe
Advance Purchase in Rail travel in Europe
Both domestic and international advance purchase tickets are offered increasingly through a number of schemes. Some are unrefundable or even set to a specific person's name, others can be changed for a fee. Consider carefully whether there is any possibility that you may need to travel earlier or later than you booked. If you're making a day trip somewhere, are connecting from a flight, have reason to fear local road traffic or otherwise can't commit to an exact time, ask before booking what the penalties are for missing your train, and how much extra a more flexible ticket would be. If you have a restricted ticket, do take care to get the right train, as if you get the wrong one by mistake you may have to pay a full open single fare, a "penalty fare" or a fine, or you might even be prosecuted. So:
if you're going from B to C and you have a ticket for the 13:30 train, and you see a train just arriving at about 13:28, make sure it's not in fact the 12:30 running an hour late, and
if you're at A with a ticket to C on the 17:00, and you get there early and see two trains for your destination, make sure you get on the 17:00 (and not the 16:30 or 17:30) and ask someone in authority if you're in doubt.
Don't expect too much sympathy if you get it wrong or if you miss your train. The only exceptions are, of course, if your train is cancelled (then you can get the next one) or if you miss a connection because of a delay to or cancellation of some other train on the same ticket.
Railway specific information:
In the UK, Advance [purchase] tickets are a cheap way of travelling if you can get hold of them and can live with being locked into a specific departure time. They are however sold in very limited numbers and often sell out months in advance. Advance fares are available at many different rates in different quantities on particular trains - the cheapest fare may be as low as £1, even if the non-resticted full-fare is £100. Check with the applicable railway or discount services like In many cases round-trip tickets may cost only £1 more than a one-way ticket for long journeys, or 10p more for short journeys. For more information see Rail travel in the United Kingdom.
In France, you can make use of iDTGV offers, which allow travel on selected high speed routes for as little as €19 one-way if booked in advance.
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Rail travel in Europe Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.