Can you avoid extra reservation fees on Eurail by booking and paying extra for a sleeper berth?

Question

I'm taking off at the end of July to spend 2 months travelling around Europe, but I have a question about the Eurail pass.

I was looking to purchase the Eurail Global Pass Youth, but I'm a little confused about how the seat reservations/supplements work, and I'm hoping someone could fill me in a little bit. I'm mainly travelling through Spain, Portugal, France and Italy (and then the final month in Greece, but I'm taking a ferry over and don't need rail travel there) and I had heard that in France and Italy, at least, most of the trains are high speed and thus will require the extra fee. Is this true? What is the general price per trip?

Would booking and paying for an extra sleeper supplement on the ticket avoid having to pay extra for the reservation fee (the website doesn't mention anything about this)? I'm wondering because like many young travellers, I can sleep soundly almost everywhere, and hoped to save money on accomodations by grabbing Z's on a night train.

Thanks everyone!

Answer 1

In most of France you can still travel on the slower trains without making reservations, but you will find that the cost for most trains are small and the time advantage can be big.

You can check train times with and without fast trains on this site:

http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.e...

If you change standard search into without ICE you do not get the fast trains for which you have to pay for a reservation, but be careful, some other trains will still have a red R for compulsary reservation.

For night trains you will almost always have to make a reservation, but the reservation for a seat is much smaller than that for a bed. But consider if it is worth it, for 25 dollar (or something like that) you can stretch out and not worry about your things.

When you pay for the bed (either a couchette or a sleeper) you do not need to pay extra for the reservation, that is part of the price you pay for the bed.

I am not as familiar with the situation in Italy, but I thought that the basic system works the same as in France, either you pay extra for the fast train or you do not and take the normal train.

Often you can just walk to the ticket office a few minutes before you leave to get that seat reservation, with the computerized systems they sell reservations almost till the train leaves.