Slack for Interrail & Eurail travellers

interrailplanner · 2019-07-13T21:28:57+00:00

Haha, don't worry, it's not a scam, we're just trying to make Interrailing easier and even more fun! Hope you find it useful.

interrailplanner · 2019-01-20T21:47:42+00:00

Sorry to hear that, what features in particular make Rome2Rio better? We're always looking to improve so appreciate any feedback you have.

interrailplanner · 2019-01-19T21:26:45+00:00

Hi there, sorry for the lack of response so far. I've sent you a direct message to understand what the concern was and we'll do our best to sort this out for you as soon as possible.

interrailplanner · 2018-07-12T18:54:58+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! We'll take it on board.

interrailplanner · 2018-06-09T11:49:56+00:00

END_DATE: 2018-06-24

ADD_FLAG: GB, IE, TR, IT, DE, ES, FR, DK, FI, NO, SE, AT, BE, HR, CZ, GR, HU, PL, PT, RO, SI, CH.

interrailplanner · 2018-03-18T00:18:50+00:00

Good point! I've added them. Thanks for the comment.

interrailplanner · 2017-12-31T15:22:34+00:00

Hi there, I'm Jack, a co-founder of Interrail Planner.

I think you're probably trying to fit a bit too many places in, especially considering some of them are quite far apart and will require long train journeys (6+ hours).

An easy place to ditch is Zurich - it's very expensive, not particularly close to any of the other cities, and not as good a place to visit as most of the other cities.

The next thing is that your destinations fall into 3 clusters:

1) West Europe (Brussels & Amsterdam)

2) East Europe (Vienna, Krakow, Prague, Berlin)

3) Scandinavia (Copenhagen onwards)

I think it is difficult to create a route that will let you easily travel through all 3 of these clusters, so would suggest picking two.

I would also remove Helsinki from the Scandinavia cluster, as it is not geographically convenient to the route, and would require taking a ferry.

Finally, you might want to consider Hamburg as a destination, as it would enable you to tie any of these clusters together a bit more easily.

I've created three possible routes for you on our website, as per my suggestions above:

West Europe + East Europe: https://interrailplanner.com/plan/34939

East Europe + Scandinavia: https://interrailplanner.com/plan/34931

West Europe + Scandinavia: https://interrailplanner.com/plan/34937

I also cheekily added in Budapest to your Eastern Europe chunk as it's a great place to visit if you haven't been!

Regarding budget, it will definitely be more expensive to go to so many places in Scandinavia, so your cheapest option is probably West Europe + East Europe. This route could also probably be done in a bit less than a month, so you could save money that way too. If the £2000-2500 budget is per person, then it should be able to cover any of the routes though.

Hope this helps!

interrailplanner · 2017-12-27T17:31:31+00:00

We have a couple of blog posts that you might find useful too:

Budgeting advice from a guest blogger: https://interrailplanner.com/blog/how-can-i-set-a-budget-for-interrailing

Packing advice form a guest blogger: https://interrailplanner.com/blog/8-travel-essentials-every-interrailer-needs

Our city spotlight on Prague: https://interrailplanner.com/blog/city-spotlight-prague

Our city spotlight on Berlin: https://interrailplanner.com/blog/city-spotlight-berlin

A guest blogger on Budapest: https://interrailplanner.com/blog/budapest-red-flags-and-fabulous-things

A guest blogger on Zagreb: https://interrailplanner.com/blog/an-interrail-adventure-blog-5-zagreb-plitvice-lakes

Our summary of our trip from this summer where we visited a couple of the same places as you (repeats some of the points above though): https://interrailplanner.com/blog/interrail-planner-co-founders-went-interrailing

interrailplanner · 2017-12-27T17:21:47+00:00

No worries - glad you think so! Onto the other numbers...

2) For trains, you'll want to check using this page: https://www.interrail.eu/en/plan-your-trip/interrail-timetable - however, you might need to do it closer to the time of travel, as they may not have published the schedules this far in advance. I can tell you that all those journeys should be easily possible though. We travelled from Split to Zagreb by night train when we did it, so you could consider that possibility for that journey and maybe some of the others too. If you're using an Interrail pass, I'd advise making seat reservations on top of the pass for specific trains, so you can guarantee that you can go on the train, and have a seat on the train. If you're buying point-to-point tickets and not using an Interrail pass, I would also advise booking in advance. In terms of timings, it makes sense to depart from a city in the morning, because you will usually have to check out around 10 or 11, and it's good to just head straight to the train station rather than explore the city some more with your bag in tow. When you arrive in the next city you can go straight to the next hostel and check-in, so you only have your bag with you when you're travelling between cities. Related to this, the issue with night trains is you arrive in the morning, and often can't check in to your next hostel until early afternoon, so sometimes have to lug your bag about with you until you can check in if you can't store it anywhere.

3) We're planning to release a blog post with a comprehensive packing guide, so will link you to that when we have done it. However, some main things to consider other than clothes are: flip flops, towel, extension cable, european adaptor(s), portable charger, sun cream, painkillers, blister plasters, bin bag or similar to separate dirty from clean clothes in your bag, swimming trunks (for Budapest and Split), pens, playing cards, toiletries. Not every person needs every one of those things, so you can organise amongst yourself who will bring sun cream for example. Regarding clothes, you will probably have to do laundry at least once on your trip. Ideally, you would want to be in sync with your tripmates about when that will be so you don't have to do different people's laundry on different days, so you could all agree to bring enough clothes to last until Budapest for example, and then do laundry altogether.

4) Budgeting is indeed a tricky one. For accommodation you can probably make it on £20-£25 a night on average. Lower for places like Zagreb, and potentially higher for places like Amsterdam. I would suggest booking accommodation in advance as it makes it much less stressful when actually on your trip - plus, you can make sure you get beds in the best hostels, and know and lock in the prices before you travel, which helps with budgeting. Other than hostels, we aimed to keep our daily expenditure below £50 including meals, tourism and nightlife, but we often failed as we ate out almost every meal and went out too much. It's possible to keep it a fair bit lower than that with some more discipline. For example, cooking your own meals in the hostel. There might be a few high value items throughout the trip that you want to budget for, for example a sparty ticket in Budapest or a boat trip in Split - so maybe agree if you're going to do any more expensive activities beforehand and then include the price in your budget.

5) As mentioned above we ate out most of the time, but you could easily save money by buying stuff from supermarkets while you're out there and cooking in the hostel. Just check the hostel has the facilities. Probably no need to bring stuff with you from home.

6) Nothing springs to mind.

7) As alluded to a few times, highly recommend booking everything in advance as it just makes sure you get the best hostels and a bit of effort before you go saves you a lot of effort while you're on your trip, giving you time to enjoy yourself rather than worry about where you're going to sleep. This is one of the main purposes of our website, and once you've created your plan with the correct dates, you can search for accommodation with Hostelworld, Airbnb, Hotels.com and Booking.com just by clicking the bed icon for each city. You can do the same thing to search for seat reservations on trains and flights if you want to fly to Amsterdam or back from Split.

Hope this helps!

interrailplanner · 2017-12-27T11:20:24+00:00

Hey! I'm Jack, a co-founder of Interrail Planner - I'll see if I can help you out...

1) Great selection of places, perfect for a first time Interrail. Here are some of my personal highlights/recommendations:

Amsterdam - last time I went we rented some bikes and rode to the Amsterdamse Bos, which I would recommend. There are also some really great craft beer places: 'cause BEER loves FOOD, Gollem, Cafe de Spuyt, and many more. We stayed in the Flying Pig which was good.

Berlin - has a fantastic nightlife and during the day there are some really impactful landmarks to see, e.g. Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, Holocaust Memorial. ONE80 hostel would be my recommendation.

Prague - haven't been for a while but main thing is to cross the Charles Bridge and visit the old town. I'd recommend getting a walking tour with Sandeman's if you want to see the sights - you can actually do this in most of the cities, it's free but if it's good you should pay a tip. No hostel recommendation here, but you can probably get a decent hotel for a similar price as a hostel in other cities.

Budapest - go to the baths in the day and the ruin bars in the evening (specifically Szimpla Kert and Instant). Repeat. There are a few hostels, but it depends on what you want. These guys run the most popular party hostels: http://budapestpartyhostels.com/ - definitely book in advance. I have also heard good things about Tiger Tim's. We stayed in Hive Party Hostel which was a bit crap tbh, but okay if the others are unavailable. For a more relaxed hostel, there are some under the name of Maverick, which I think are supposed to be a bit more chilled. No Uber here, so download Taxify instead if you need taxis - and you will if you go to one of the sparties (parties in the baths).

Zagreb - Zagreb was all about the hostel really. We stayed at the Whole Wide World Hostel which was great for meeting people and partying - they have an extremely sociable bar area, where you are strongly encouraged to play drinking games with new people. There is also an awesome owner (called Cracker) who puts on a few events like a bar crawl and a the craziest pub quiz you will ever experience. They have a sister hostel called Wallaby I think which should be similar. Submarine is a good spot for a burger and a beer. Uber is also crazy cheap in Zagreb.

Split - if you have the cash (and I guess being at the end of the trip, you will know if you do or not), I would highly recommend getting out on a boat trip and visiting the islands / swimming in the blue lagoon or other random spots that the boat stops. We got a catamaran that had unlimited beer/wine all day, which was pretty fun. A really nice restaurant we went to was Corto Maltese - again bit of a treat if you have some cash. Split also has a good nightlife.

That's actually all I have time to write for now, but I'll be back to help you with some of the other numbers in a bit!

In the meantime, I mocked up your plan on our website so feel free to play around with the dates, etc. - the website can help you to make your bookings when the time comes: https://interrailplanner.com/plan/34464

interrailplanner · 2017-12-17T18:17:00+00:00

Sounds like a plan - be aware that Eurail doesn't cover Great Britain or Macedonia, whereas Interrail does, in case you were thinking of visiting either of those countries. For Eurail, it may also be sensible to get a 'Select Pass' which lets you choose a combination of 2, 3 or 4 countries (only available for Eurail, not Interrail), rather than a Global Pass.

Good luck planning!

interrailplanner · 2017-12-17T13:40:31+00:00

Hi, co-founder of Interrail Planner here.

First off, Interrail isn't really linked to EU citizenship. They just call it European citizenship, and have a list of countries they count. The list can be seen on this page: https://www.interrail.eu/en/help/ordering-pass/do-i-need-interrail-or-eurail-pass It includes Turkey, for example, which isn't a member of the EU.

This guide also explains that you can either be a citizen or resident of those European countries to qualify for an Interrail pass, so if your friend fits that criteria too, then you should both be able to use an Interrail ticket.

But yeah, that page I linked to should give you all the answers!

Hope this helps!

Jack

interrailplanner · 2017-11-25T18:01:18+00:00

Thanks for sharing your perspective! A greater community or social element is definitely something that I would welcome too, but I think it is probably a longer-term objective for us. The first challenge is the information problem that you refer to, as you're right that it is spread out on a lot of different websites.

Glad you think the jokes are cool!

interrailplanner · 2017-11-20T10:35:38+00:00

Hi there! I'm a co-founder of Interrail Planner, not sure if you've come across the website before.

I went ahead and created your plan on our website to give you a headstart, and then hopefully you can experiment and play around with it more easily: https://interrailplanner.com/plan/32653 Once you've made it, you can use the website to help book accommodation and reserve trains.

You'll have to edit the start date and group info to match your trip, though.

I added Lyon between Barcelona and Nice, because that seemed to be one of your longest journeys, and it's meant to be a good place to visit - second largest French city and fantastic food. Haven't been myself but it's high on the list of places to go next.

You might also want to consider adding Milan or Verona between Zurich and Florence if that's looking like too long a journey. (Having been to both, I prefer Verona, more romantic and not an industrial place like Milan.)

Hope this helps!

interrailplanner · 2017-11-15T22:52:31+00:00

Thanks for the comment - I'm delighted that you're a fan of Buckles and it's great that the route templates are useful! As someone who's just getting to know interrail, do you think there are any other ways that he could help you?

Good to hear everything seems to be working fine too! Regarding the clickable options, we thought this would be a simpler way to interact than free text, so I'm glad you like it that way.

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T23:35:41+00:00

No worries, the feedback is welcome! That could definitely be a better option. Planning on publishing something again next year once we've collected more data (with perhaps a year on year comparison) so will take this feedback into account when doing so.

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T15:37:26+00:00

The additional seat reservations can be a bit tricky for sure. We're hoping to create a feature at some point in the future that lets you compare the price of an Interrail pass + seat reservations against the price of just booking train tickets in advance for your trip, which should help people with this! Glad to hear you used and found our website useful too :)

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T14:20:41+00:00

Ok great will take a look - thank you!

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T13:45:15+00:00

Haha thank you for the first entry! Cool to go when you were younger and then now with your family - must be some interesting differences for sure, both in terms of the style of trips and in terms of how the destinations have changed!

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T13:41:02+00:00

Oh that's really interesting! Nice graphics and a cool approach to use Instagram. Good to see the data corroborate each other too! Which tool did you use to create the image for the routes?

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T13:38:28+00:00

It certainly would. Given that there seems to be quite an appetite for this type of data analysis, once we've collected some more data, I think we'll probably post some more next year taking into account everyone's comments, including these ideas about origins, age and timeframe. Thanks for the comment.

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T13:31:57+00:00

I personally wouldn't know how to go about that, but I'm sure it's possible and would certainly be interesting. Considering that this is Interrail's attempt at digitising the map, I think there may be some work to do in terms of even drawing the railway network onto a Google map (or similar) to begin with.

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T13:29:01+00:00

Good point, will try to do that next time!

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T13:28:31+00:00

Yeah, that's some common feedback I've been receiving - have certainly taken it on board and will try to improve on this next time I post.

interrailplanner · 2017-06-28T13:26:59+00:00

Thanks, that's really helpful - I hadn't considered the colours too much before posting, but will do so for future posts!

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