PhilippN
Traveller
1 comments
Posted 2 years ago
Hi there ,
I recently found this page and already read quite a bit , since I am a total fan of train travel ( in the last 5 years I bought 5 BC100 and 15 interrail passes for business travel) I have a couple of things that are nearly impossible to find out online, f.e. who runs Interrail? I buy my pass online through interrail.eu but is that a private company belonging to a private person? If so , where does this company buy their passes from ? SNCF, DB, etc. are only listed as partners , not as owners…
Peter
Traveller
9331 comments
Hi Philipp.
In short words: Interrail (interrail.eu) and Eurail (eurail.com) is a company which is owned by the European national railway companies.
There was a reorganisation of their structure in 2020/2021 which we will see in 2022.
Everywhere the price for the Interrail/Eurail pass is the same, no matters if you buy it online from their website directly or from a train station in Germany, France, ... anyway, they now offer the mobile pass which you have on your mobile phone. More comfortable, faster and no need to get the rail pass send to you by letter.
They have their office in Utrecht (NL).
Best wishes, Peter :)
PhilippN
Traveller
1 comments
Hi Peter,
thanks for your reply, that is what I suspected already. Do you possibly have a link or source where that info can be found?
On multiple occasions I have faced the situation that the ticket controller reads my Interrail pass and regards it as a somewhat inferior ticket and Interrail.eu as some travel agency that his employer (the DB, on a Paris - Mannheim train) has no relationship with.
Is interrail.eu then also the entitity that negotiates quotas and seats with each national (or international in the case of Thalys) rail company? While it is generally not a problem to get reservations the day before (f.e. in Italy or Spain) I had to miss a train in France a couple of times because the quota was already used up.
Thanks in advance and best regards,
Philipp
nltrainer
Traveller
1336 comments
No, but having worked before in travel (and now in pension/rente) and knowing a bit about how INTernat. train trips/ticketing was done and is now done and administrated between the 30+ national train companies, part of this is far too complicated to write down here. NS, dutch railways, has kept the administrative seat from days of yore when there was an extremely complicated system to transfer payments for INTernational tickets in the times there were only those burocratic monopolistic and often strike-prone national state railways.
THat some DB-conductors may regard this with suspect-and not just they, has to do with the general public that used to ride on IR and its many ways that in the past fraud and manipulations were possible-and actually still are. PLus that off the normal busy INTern. lines-and certainly now with covid travel restrictions, this ticket is very rare for some.
Incidentally I´ve used a IR for 2 monthes late autumn, crossing DB/DE many times on it-it was storno for a same ticket bought with discount just before covid and had to be used before ´21 ended, but being non-DE did not really encounter too much suspicion.
There is NO general system of negotiated quota or whatever-all participating train comps get their share in the end, thats why they want to see the travel reports. Most passes are sold in north-EUR but used in South (notably IT and FR).
Yes, most in ES/RENFE and after that certainly FR/SNCF-TGV make life hard for IR-they have to protect income. BTW; IF in FR quota is used, you can still use any seat as long as available for 20 eur/ride in stead of 10 in the quotum.
When Sie ja doch mehr wissen wollte-geht zur forum das as nun auch auf eu-interrail/eu gibt, frage nach rvdb, rian van der borgt, aus BE, oder suche seine fb-er gibt an als hobby das SCIV=INTern. Eisenbahn Tarifwesen mit alle seine folgen zu haben und ist bestimmt eine nicht (mehr) eisenbahner it sehr viel kenntnis im dieses feld
BTW-also do read the many problems and pitfalls these new online passes also have!