planning a rail journey from Manchester to Barcelona

Update (2024-11-03): This year we bought a four-day Interrail "one country" pass for Spain. This worked pretty well. One gotcha is that you only get two days of inbound/outbound travel, which means if you want the Interrail pass to cover the cost of the Manchester to London leg you have to do that the same day as the Eurostar. So breaking up the journey by staying the night in London doesn't work - but it's totally fine if you do Paris instead.

The other thing is that the Eurostar has fixed amounts of seating which can be reserved for pass users, so while this method does avoid the ridiculous costs of the Eurostar dynamic pricing, you do still need to reserve a seat well in advance.

We're going to Barcelona to see mum for a few weeks in October. Because gestures broadly at boiling planet we decided to try getting the train. This turns out to be pretty expensive, compared to budget flights. We will fly back 😞

The trip is spread over two days, which obviously impacts the cost. The last Paris - Barcelona train sets off at 14:56, so we have to be at St. Pancras Intl for about 8am to get to Paris on time - this is technically possible with a 5am departure from Manchester Piccadilly, if you don't mind 17 hours of continuous travel. I do mind, personally.

The costs for the two of us work out as follows.

• Manchester -> London advanced single + two together railcard: £43
• Cheap hotel near Kings Cross: £95
• Eurostar London -> Paris: £344 (!)
• SNCF Paris -> Barcelona (some kid of promotional rate): £67 (€78)

Total: £550

As you can see, the vast majority of the cost here is the Eurostar, which seems absurdly expensive to be honest. It's a shame, because if tickets were available anywhere near their baseline standard fare of £70, I would actually consider this a viable alternative to flying, financially speaking.

-- ouro, 2023-11-25