Inter rail advice and ideas for an 18 year old. Thanks

[bellinisurge]

I went interalling in 1984 . Safe to say my knowledge is out of date.
Dd wants to go in her proposed gap year 2025-26 with her boyfriend or a friend.
Back in the 80s, you bought a ticket and just went places. I know now there's loads of different options.
She's doing her own research but i wanted to tap into the MN hive mind so I'm not completely in the dark.
So please give me your best advice/suggestions on ticket options, hostels, best routes, budgeting, best backpack, overnight trains . Anything like that and more.
Thanks

Definitely check out seat61.com for advice, particularly about sleeper trains. The lighter she can travel, the better. Clothes that are easy to wash and dry quickly, a microfibre towel, shampoo bar, ear plugs and a toilet roll were my essentials. A comfortable backpack too.

Thanks

Deffo look at Seat 61. Sometimes you can get tickets really cheaply in advance so it depends if she has a plan of definite trips or not, as it can be worth weighing the cost against the interrail ticket. Saying that, in 2019 I booked individual trains, this year I plan to buy an interrail pass as I cannot find the tickets so cheaply. You can book seat reservations only via the various train companies if this is important. The Eurostar only has limited seats available for pass holders (costs about £30 a seat as I recall) so should be booked as early as possible. I'm getting on and like my creature comforts so plan to the nth degree, but I know for others the fun is just travelling freely. I'm on a FB Interrail for old people group, loads of tips and advice so there might be others for the less elderly 😁

Thanks all

My DD went for 3 weeks summer 22 with a friend. They bought a 4 week ticket and booked all their trains and hostels/airbnb in advance before they left. They left it too late to book Eurostar so flew on the cheapest flights they could find out to Amsterdam and back from Vienna and planned the trip round that.
Lessons she says she learned, night trains are awful they didn’t get a winks sleep and then couldn’t check into hostel till later in day (they had a very grumpy day in Berlin, nearly fell out with each other, thankfully realised they were both just tired).
She said they did the right thing booking as trains very busy (it was august) and they wouldn’t have got seats otherwise.
It got hotter and further south and east they went, Budapest and Bratislava particularly were unpleasantly hot so she says she wouldn’t go back in august but wants to go back as she felt she didn’t see everything she wanted to.

There's now zones of travel and it's pretty expensive. Several of my DD's friends have done pan European travel but they used flix buses or similar

Great advice. Thanks

If she has a planned route it's worth doing a comparison of journey cost if you were to book tickets separately. Pass use varies from country to country. For example, in France you would not be able to get on most trains without a seat reservation alongside your interrail pass. TGV reservations varied but were at least €10. In Austria/Germany however you can jump on whatever train you like without reservations. I think France/Spain/Italy/Portugal you need reservations, north of this you don't (that's not an exact science though). You get country passes too, so maybe worth looking at mixing it with this and tickets for individual journeys. Depending on where she would like to go.

I guess it depends on where they want to go. If they're spending a lot of time in Eastern Europe then it's probably cheaper just to buy the tickets individually.

As everyone says, Seat61 is the place for suggestions, and bahn.de is the place to check timetables.

If they plan to go to Stockholm, the AF Chapman is a youth hostel on board a old sailing boat.

Personally, I love sleeper trains, but I can understand that some people can have trouble sleeping. The new NightJet sleeper cabins look fun - https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/nightjet-new-generation.htm