8 Countries, 47 Trains, 1 Eurail Pass

When I saw the Black Friday deal for the Eurail pass last November, I didn’t entirely know what I was getting myself into. After not leaving the United States for the first twenty years of my life, all I knew was that I wanted to see as much of the world as I could in the few months that I was going to be abroad. So, I decided to purchase the three-month unlimited youth Eurail pass for €570, 25% off of the original price. Now, three months, 47 trains, 7,212 kilometers, and over 2 days, 6 hours, and 23 minutes spent on trains later, I can confidently say that what seemed like a freakishly expensive purchase at the time, turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made.

With Bonn as my base, I used my weekends traveling all across Europe by train, visiting Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg, Austria, Czechia, and The Netherlands. Although some of these trips were planned weeks in advance, most of them were just spontaneous decisions a day or two prior. And that is exactly where having the pass really paid off.

Train tickets in Europe can be extremely affordable… if you book them months in advance. However, being here for such a short amount of time, and as students with classes and homework and constant schedule changes, we lived on the fly. Because of this, if we were to purchase tickets per trip, we could have easily spent upwards of €200 for a round-trip ticket, depending on things like the route and timing of the trains.

Let’s break down the costs:

• Average round-trip fare (last minute): ~€200
• I took 47 trains, that’s over 20 round trips
• Even at only 10 round trips, that’s ~€2,000 worth of travel
• The normal price of the pass is ~€780, €570 during Black Friday

Even if I had bought all my tickets super far in advance, they still would have cost me €60 round trip, that’s still ~€1,200 for 20 trips, more than double what I paid for the pass.

So was it worth it? Aside from the obvious cost savings, the other factors that made the Eurail pass so worth it were, spontaneity, flexibility, comfort, and ease. On a whim, it was so easy to get up in the morning and decide to make a trip out to Luxembourg. I could pretty much take any train that I wanted, not having to worry about getting on a specific train at a set time. From there I could just load the journey onto the app, have my QR code ready to scan, and enjoy the gorgeous scenery out the window.

If you’re staying in Europe for a while and thinking about hopping on a train every now and then, I could not recommend the Eurail pass enough, especially if you are under 27 and qualify for their youth rate.

So yeah, €570, three months, 47 train rides across 8 countries. Not too shabby.

Written By: Andrew M