pblaine08 asked:
Me and my family are traveling in Europe this summer. Our train travel looks like this:
Munich > Salzburg > Vienna then either
1. Paris > Lucerne > Munich
2. Venice > Lucerne > Munich
Should we buy our tickets before we travel or while we are there? Also should we get a rail pass or not? Thanks!
get a rail pass here (USA) if you are going to do a lot of train travel.
Otherwise you might as well get your tickets over there in case you change your travel plans.
Generally, you can save a lot on point-to-point tickets if you buy them far enough in advance to take advantage of the savings fares. For example, the standard fare on the route from Lucerne to Munich is 73.60 to 105.60 euro depending on the specific trains and connections you choose. However, some of the routes offer a savings fare of 39 euro. Obviously, these tend to sell out fairly fast. You can get similar discounts on other routes – Venice to Lucerne can be as low as 31.80 euro. You would have to pay an additional reservation fee on these trains with the pass. (See: , ) . In many places the reservation/supplements for the faster trains when you have a Eurail pass is nominal, but not always.
In order to determine whether the pass is worth the cost, you need to compare the overall price of individual tickets to the price of the pass plus requires supplements/reservations fees. It is often cheaper to get point-to-point tickets particularly when you can buy tickets in advance.
You can check specific schedules and prices at the various national train websites:
(Germany) (Italy) (Austria) (Switzerland)
Apart from what conley39 wrote note that there are special offers for Munich-Salzburg-Vienna. I would not buy a railpass for this section of your travels. Instead I would buy a so-called Bayern-Ticket for Munich-Salzburg and a so-called Einfach-Raus-Ticket for Salzburg-Vienna. Travelling with these special tickets might be slow, but they are valid for a group of up to 5 people, so the price cannot be beaten. Take 28 EUR for Bayern-Ticket (Munich-Salzburg)and 28 EUR for Einfach-Raus-Ticket (Salzburg-Vienna) and divide through 5 and you can see what kind of bargain that is compared to the regular EC train fares of 29 EUR and 44,20 Euro per person.