Our Rail Europe Review: A Good—But Not the Best—Platform for Train Tickets

Rail Europe can find you train tickets for much of Western Europe—but its coverage is not nearly as complete as it likes to pretend. On its website it says “We’re official agents for rail and bus operators in the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.”

That should read “SOME rail operators” and “VERY FEW” bus operators.

The logos for partner train operators on Rail Europe’s pages are confusing. Individual customers cannot actually buy tickets for some of the train operators listed, and thus miss out on finding those options if they are only searching on Rail Europe. We’re not quite sure what’s going on, but it appears that Rail Europe has partnerships with these brands but perhaps only to sell their tickets to certain travel agencies and other B2B partners, and not to individual travelers on the website. Or they sell only certain routes in certain countries.

So take the Rail Europe listings of places it can take you with a big grain of salt. The platform can perhaps get you to those places, but it’s far from an all-in-one search engine showing all train routes for those areas. A major current issue that I see is the failure to show good Ouigo (France’s budget train) options in France, though Ouigo does seem to be offered by Rail Europe in Spain.

Rail Europe has been around for decades in various forms and changed greatly in terms of ownership, objectives, offerings, and internal working.

Rail Europe began in 1932 in New York. For many decades, Rail Europe operated as a travel agency and then a website selling the French train operator SNCF’s train tickets to a North American and then world audiences, often at a large markup.

In the early 2000s, there were several different Rail Europe sites, each for different markets, but each were owned by or strongly connected to the SNCF. These sites also sold tickets for other European trains.

The various Rail Europe or Raileurope websites not only charged way too much for tickets, they had poor coverage of European rail networks and even of France. Frankly, these websites did not work very well or serve any real purpose to us travelers in the know; they seemed like a bit of a rip-off for those who couldn’t navigate the European systems.

Meanwhile, the European train booking platform Loco2 was founded in 2006. In the early 2010s, when we founded this minimalist.travel site; Loco2 was our top recommendation for booking European train travel, at least for a time. Loco2 was bought by SNCF in 2017 and over the next years the excellent Loco2 search engine began to be used by the Rail Europe sites, which were consolidated into the single Rail Europe we see today. Loco2’s tech is still the backbone of the current Rail Europe website, and still works great.

As a result, the Rail Europe website of the 2020s is much, much better and more useful than previous versions of Raileurope or Raileurope[.]co[.]uk that you may have seen previously, and that still show up and are criticized in outdated reviews, press coverage, and travel blogs. (If you see previous articles or forum complaints about Rail Europe from previous years, they may be commenting on an entirely different website from the current version.)

Currently, Rail Europe sells about 5 million European train tickets each year in countries around the world through its website and through its many travel industry partners. Since 2022, it is no longer part of the SNCF (French train operator) and is now a privately owned company.

To use Rail Europe, you type your departure and destination points in the search bar on the main page and choose a date. Unlike Trainline, you don’t see a range of dates and prices (which can help you travel on the cheapest date).

If you’ve entered cities and dates that are covered by Rail Europe, you’ll see a list of options. Be sure to scroll down, as, again unlike with Trainline, the cheapest and best options do not necessarily surface to the top of your results. However, Rail Europe does flag the cheapest option with a little black tag next to the price.

Alongside the different options, Rail Europe may try to encourage you to buy a rail pass and this may be featured prominently. These Eurail and Interrail passes are almost never worth it anymore for anyone, since they don’t include budget train operators or buses and have plenty of tack-on fees, but see that article for more if you want.

In your Rail Europe results, you need to click on the option to see what operator it is as well as your options to upgrade to first or business class. Also pay attention to the trip duration because some routes are high speed whereas other routes may be on very slow trains and include a number of changes.

The screen following a selection generally gives you some options for seating preferences, like being at a table and having a window or aisle seat.

The booking fee is also visible here. Rail Europe booking fees are per cart, so it’s best to book all of your train tickets at the same time for a trip if possible and do one checkout, to save a few bucks. In 2024, the Rail Europe booking fees vary but go up to £6.45 / €7.45 / US$8.45 / CA$9.95 /AU$9.95, which can be a bit more than Trainline’s typical ~3% fee but a bit less than Trainline on larger trip purchases.

The Rail Europe fees do not apply to small regional train purchases of less than £20 / US$15 / €15 / CA$20 / AU$20.

At this point you’ll enter your information (which should match the ID you use in the train when traveling) and pay for the tickets right on the Rail Europe site with MasterCard (credit or debit), Visa (credit or debit), Visa Electron, JCB, Maestro, or American Express. You’ll get e-tickets that you can print or save to a mobile device.

To get refunds or make changes of train tickets that permit this (as shown in the ticket choices while purchasing), go to “Your trips” in your account, and select the cancelation or change option that you want. Being able to do this with Rail Europe (and not with the national operators like SNCF, Renfe, etc.) is a major advantage of the platform as it is generally much easier to use than national operators’ refund systems. Rail Europe’s booking fee is non-refundable, however.

To get to Rail Europe customer service and skip the bots, go to this Rail Europe contact page. Keep in mind that for issues with the train operators themselves, like lost items, you will need to contact the particular train operator in question (SNCF, Renfe, Trenitalia, etc.), and good luck with that, as the Spanish, French, and Italian operators’ customer service is universally awful in my experience and from what I hear from others.

I have seen a lot of complaints around the internet about Rail Europe customer service—particularly from Americans trying to refund their European train tickets. Rail Europe only facilitates refunds according to individual train operators’ policies. The odds of a refund in special cases where the refund is not specifically allowed on the ticket type are very low, and the treatment if purchasing directly from the train operators is likely to be even worse. So the Rail Europe brand appears to be taking the hit for the poor refund policies of the train operators.

• Rail Europe’s interface is simple, uncluttered, and actually works. Unlike many national European train operators’ sites, there aren’t lots of error messages or poor translations.
• Rail Europe can, on occasion, find better and cheaper route options than Trainline or the national operators’ sites for complex trips. (Trainline is better in most cases though, in our hundreds of tests.) This makes Rail Europe worth checking at least. It’s much better at this than the other competitors like Omio.
• Rail Europe can compare some operators side-by-side, like Ouigo, Iryo, and Ave in Spain, so that you can see which is cheapest and best, and not have to go to each operator’s site (nor know what they all are). It works like the Kiwi or Kayak flight search engines, but for trains.
• You can search and pay in a variety of currencies, languages, and with non-European payment cards. This is key, as many European national operator websites are very bad or reject foreign credit cards.
• The ticket prices for individual trips are the same as what you would pay if booking directly.
• Rail Europe is more straightforward about its booking fees than competitors and they are flat per order, rather than a percentage.

• Rail Europe’s coverage of different train operators is not as broad as Trainline’s, so you don’t get as complete of a comparison of your trip options.
• Rail Europe has a smart booking engine, but Trainline’s is usually smarter at picking out cheap and worthwhile routes for your journey.
• There is a small per-basket booking fee.

Various searches of travel forums, consumer organizations, and Reddit show some customers having issues with Rail Europe. The issues some have seem overblown; Rail Europe is a legitimate booking site selling real tickets for SNCF, Renfe, Deutsche Bahn, Trenitalia, and other European train systems. We’ve never had any problems ourselves, nor have we been able to find concrete evidence of the “scams” that some people seem to be referring to about Rail Europe. We suspect the reports are some combination of the following:

• Some of these complaints are extremely old and pertain to quite different versions of Rail Europe in years past, as we described above, when various “Rail Europe” websites would charge North American, Australian, and other users quite a lot more for European tickets.
• There may be scam versions of Rail Europe out there; be sure to use the real Rail Europe website we link to here.
• It’s true that Rail Europe support is only via online tickets and not phone, which is annoying, especially for less tech savvy users.
• We use and recommend the website version of Rail Europe; there are also official Rail Europe apps in the Android and Apple app stores but they seem to have more limited functionality at present than the website, as there are complaints from reviewers in the stores. It’s also much easier to plan on a computer with multiple tabs open, because you want to be able to research where, for example, the different train stations are located in the cities that you are going to before clicking that buy button.
• Some complaints that we’ve read seem to come out of users not understanding the difference between an e-ticket and a receipt. Be sure to download and either print or keep your e-ticket handy in your mobile device. For less tech-savvy users, get help in printing out your e-ticket, which likely has a QR code, and is different depending on the train system.
• Rail Europe does not run the trains themselves. Think of them as a travel agent; they’re helping you to find and purchase the right tickets for your travel across a myriad of European train systems.
• Travel in Europe is challenging, with its many languages and often much less customer-centric view of customer service than, say, in the Americas. There are so, so many advantages to this way of life, but it can make it challenging to get on the right train and find your seat. Sites like this one exist partially to help navigate such travel challenges. That’s why we have articles on how you just might run into French train strikes or cranky ticket inspectors or huge, confusing train stations. Don’t take frustrations with the train café’s service out on the booking platform.
• Out of the 5 million train tickets that Rail Europe sells each year, there are bound to be some problems. But the vast majority of travelers do get to where they’re going without a hitch.

All that said, please feel free to drop comments below this article for anything else that you feel that we our our readers should be aware of. Reader comments help us keep these articles up-to-date.

Be aware that Rail Europe is the European train booking site discussed here, whereas Eurail and Interrail are systems of train passes. We explain elsewhere what these passes are and why they are not actually money-savers; in a nutshell the point-to-point tickets you can buy for individual trips from Rail Europe or from Trainline almost always now work out cheaper than the monthly vagabond rail passes that used to be so popular and were even a cultural staple. Rail Europe also sells these passes, but we wouldn’t buy them ourselves. If you’re considering it, do stop and check first for your itinerary whether it’s not cheaper to get individual tickets, even if you do last-minute ones.

Rail Europe is a reseller of Eurail and Interrail passes; the passes are not created or run by Rail Europe.