The joys of booking European train tickets: travel from Delft to Rzeszow edition.

• Look up tickets on bahn.de: well 23h of uninterrupted trains seems excessive, how about we make a stop in Berlin?
• Actually I heard there’s a sleeper train to Berlin, let’s check it out!
• Oh the only place I can book it is in europeansleeper.eu, fine I guess.
• Sleeper train only goes on specific days of the week. Well there’s one on Friday, then we can stay one day+night in Berlin before continuing to Rzeszow, perfect!
• For the way back there’s a sleeper on Sunday night, that works as well.
• Great, I have tickets for the sleeper, now let’s get the tickets from Berlin to Rzeszow!
• Uh oh: “Unfortunately, a reservation is not possible for this connection. Due to compulsory reservation, a booking is therefore not possible. Please choose another connection.” WTF?
• Let me try the Polish railway instead. What’s the website? Oh here’s polishtrains.eu, that looks plausible.
• [after entering a whole bunch of information, just before payment] “Attention! The carrier’s tariff conditions have changed. Please check the details before purchasing.”
• Ok sure, I’ll check the changed conditions. Let me pay now.
• “Attention! The carrier’s tariff conditions have changed. Please check the details before purchasing.”
• WTF?
• “Attention! The carrier’s tariff conditions have changed. Please check the details before purchasing.”
• Searches the internet
• Ok so I need to book the tickets on www.intercity.pl instead of polishtrains.eu? Of course, silly me.
• Well this website is not very well translated, but I’ll manage.
• I cannot buy a return ticket but need to buy two separate tickets, how annoying.
• [after buying the outbound ticket] “No offers fulfil the criteria.”
• Uhm hello I can see you have a train scheduled for this day, I would like to buy a ticket please?
• “You are purchasing a ticket well in advance. The departure station and time, as well as the arrival station and time, may change.”
• Well I guess that means I’ll just have to try again next week, I guess?

So the current status is that I spent too much time on this and have 3/4ths of my trip booked.

#Train #Railway #PublicTransport #EuropeanSleeper #EuropeByRail