All You Need To Know About the New Eurail Mobile Pass

The New Eurail Mobile Pass
If there’s a hill in the European travel world I’m willing to be seriously injured on, it’s this one: rail is the best way to travel around Europe. Period. Exclamation point. End of discussion.

Whether you just simply just use the train to get between Point A and Point B or use a Eurail pass to explore the length and breadth of the continent, riding the rails in Europe will be an exhilarating experience that you—or your client—will never forget.

Speaking of Eurail, the iconic passes celebrated their 50th birthday in 2022 and since they had also recently introduced a mobile pass, I figured it was time to hop aboard the rails to get re-acquainted with the experience and to take the new digital version of the Eurail Pass for a test ride.

Click on the slideshow to get up to speed on what the latest chapter in the Eurail story looks like.

Grab The App
First and foremost, you’re going to need to download the Eurail Rail Planner App. Now, if you’re into European rail travel like me, I recommend having the app on your phone all the time as it essentially allows you to have the entire European rail schedule at your fingertips. You know, for those times when you’re hit by wanderlust and need to know what potential stopovers there are between Paris and Krakow (what, just me?). The Rail Planner App is also a great tool to use in order to keep up with the latest happenings at Eurail.

Add Your Pass
After acquiring your Eurail Mobile Pass, you’ll receive an e-mail with a link. Follow that link and the subsequent instructions in order to add your pass to the “My Pass” section of the Rail Planner App. Then, you’ll be instructed to create a trip and give it a name.

You can do this step months ahead of your trip or minutes before, it doesn’t matter. The Eurail Mobile Pass isn’t truly ready to travel on until it’s been activated and you have 11 months from the time of purchase to activate it.

Pick Your Start Date
No matter which type of Eurail Mobile Pass you have, it will be valid for a specific chunk of time. Mine was a “10 Days in Two Months” Pass, meaning that I could travel on 10 days of my choosing within two months of my choosing. Therefore, the next step is to choose the date you want your Eurail Mobile Pass to begin. As you can see, I chose November 21, which meant that I had until January 20 to use my 10 travel days (to be clear, you can ride as many trains as you want during each one of your travel days).

Activation
After entering your passport information, picking the date you want to activate your pass and adding a few more details while online, your Eurail Mobile Pass is officially added to your Rail Planner App and fully activated. Hopefully, you’ll get a cute little icon celebrating the fact that you are one step closer to taking a trip of a lifetime as I did.

Now, it’s time to start adding journeys and hitting the rails.

Adding Journeys
Anytime you open up the Rail Planner App (or tap “Planner” from within the app), you are taken straight to a field where you can look up the schedule of trains departing from stations all over the continent. Just punch in your journey and you’re on your way like I was when I tapped in London St. Pancras to Amsterdam Centraal.

Choosing Your Train
Between most destinations, you’ll have a few train options to choose from, so all you have to do is pick the departure you want to ride on. After clicking on the train to get all the details, click the “Save Journey” button to add the journey to your trip.

Confirmation
The app will double-check that you really, really want to take this particular train and that you want to use one of your travel days up. Once you confirm, a ticket for your selected journey will be automatically generated inside your Rail Planner App.

Tickets, Please
Now it’s time for the moment you’ve been waiting for: boarding the train. At some point during your trip, the conductor will come around to check tickets, and when they do, your digital ticket can be easily accessed by simply tapping the “My Pass” and “Show Tickets” buttons. In two weeks of travel from London to Rome, my digital ticket scanned perfectly every single time and the process was an absolute breeze.

Cool Features
At any given time, you can click on “View Map” to see your journey and take stock of how far you’ve come and remember all the train trips you’ve taken. Or, you could just share it on social media.

More Features
The Rail Planner App also shows you statistics on your journey and a list of travel benefits and discounts that your Eurail Mobile Pass allows you to take advantage of in every destination.

Final Takeaways
As someone who has paper Eurail passes from previous trips stashed away for “sentimental value”, I was curious if the Eurail Mobile Pass experience would produce the same level of affection, and I’m thrilled to report that the answer is a resounding yes. Eurail has made the Mobile Pass process and Rail Planner App so self-explanatory and easy to use that no matter whether you are an expert or novice traveler (or tech person for that matter), you’ll easily find your way down the tracks and the app is destined to quickly become your best travel buddy.

Of course, the real magic of Eurail can be found in the train journeys themselves: the scenery out the windows, the destinations waiting to be explored at the end of the line and the ability to chart your own unique path across the continent.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to look at some potential journeys for the next trip.