Rusky
Traveller
1 comments
Posted 15 years ago
I'm having difficulty understanding how the whole interrail country of residence rule works for quite a while. A friend and I are going to be taking the Elipsos hotel train from Barcelona to Bern and were wondering on some of the offers. The first one is the special ticket offer i.e. the Interrail global ticket. Is it valid even if we are residents in Spain, since most of the trip will be thorugh France and Bern?
Another question I had was on another offer although if the answer to the previous question was yes there is no need to answer this one. There is another special offer called mini couple (or something like that) and in the description I seemed to understand that the offer is valid if the reservation has been made more than 14 days in advance, is that so?
Thanks in advance.
Peter
Traveller
9331 comments
hi Rusky ...
the rule of the country of residence is in deed a bit confusing and not so nice for persons living in big countries like Spain, France, UK, Italy, Germany and so on ... better if you live in a small country like Luxembourg and so on... ;)
the reason and a short discussion is: [u]https://rail.cc/en/country-of-residence/f947[/u]
as the train Barcelona-Bern is starting in Barcelona, you normally have to pay for the route Barcelona to the Spanish-French border. the problem is, this train has a global price (as it is a special hotel train), so the distance is not counted in kilometres - you normally can not buy a ticket Barcelona to the border and then start using InterRail in this train as citizen of Spain. :(
solutions for you:
- travel by regional train (free of supplements) from Barcelona to Perpignan and jump there in the night train Barcelona to Bern.
- have a look on the Elipsos website, they sometimes have special offers like you mentioned already. the are sometimes not far away of the supplement you have to pay with InterRail. if you book early, you might get a good price.
then it is also interesting for you to start in Barcelona with a normal ticket to Bern, stay there for 2 or 3 days and start from there with InterRail. so you save 2-3 days of you InterRail ticket. :)
Details and schedules: [u]https://rail.cc/en/night-train/spain/es[/u]
I hoep this will help you !! have a good time, Peter :)