How Railfinder works

Railfinder is created from our own experience as train travelers across Europe. As we’ve made our own travels, we’ve built up a checklist of all the things you need to do for traveling by train across countries.

This has boiled down to a few things we know that we have to do well to be a booking site that you can rely on for cross-border train travel:

Comprehensive search: One search that finds comfortable journeys across Europe, taking into account night trains, stopovers, safe transfer times, and more.
Combining tickets: Smart combination of tickets, based on the details of your specific trip.
Full operator integration: Access to all ticket types and reservations as each operator meant them to be, and full sharing of contact info so that the operator can reach you in case of disruptions.

Comprehensive search

Our search works by prioritising night trains or a nightly stopover, higher comfort, and some extra margin for your transfers. We also search the entire day of trains and rank the best options at the top, so you don’t need to be an expert yourself on what time of day the best connections depart.

Best of all? It works for all trains across Europe, even if tickets need to be purchased at the station or if we don’t - yet - sell the online tickets.

Combining tickets

A trip across Europe will almost always require a combination of tickets if you want to find the best offers.

Our ticketing system automatically combines tickets for you based on your specific trip to ensure the best through-tickets, transfer guarantees and potential discounts. You don’t need to know different search parameters or go to different sites for the same train depending on certain details - we automatically give you the best combination of tickets.

Full operator integration

We always aim to offer the tickets as the operators themselves offer them – including the names of the comfort classes, descriptions of what’s included, selection of seats, and so on.

We also aim that the ticket you get is a normal ticket as if you had bought it directly from the operator. This means that you should be able to access your ticket in the operator’s app if you wish, and that you get all updates from the operator in case of disruptions to your trip, etc.

Current progress in beta

We’re currently in a beta stage. This is our way to say that we know we still have some limitations, which we’re working to fix as soon as we can.

Ticket roadmap

We currently offer tickets for SNCB, NS, CFL, SNCF, Trenitalia, European Sleeper, Deutsche Bahn (incl. many regional trains in Germany and Eurocity trains to and from Germany), ÖBB Nightjet, international Railjet trains on the route between Germany, Austria and Italy (Brenner route) and most Euronight trains.

In the near future, we’ll be adding tickets for Eurostar and all Swiss and Swedish trains (incl. to and from Oslo and Trondheim in Norway and Copenhagen in Denmark).

We are working on bringing many more operators to our site and will be expanding our offering actively in the coming months and years.

Tickets with caveats

We offer many of our tickets with our launch partner SNCB. In some cases, you’ll get a ticket issued by SNCB even for trains run by other operators. In the following cases, we currently have some limitations that are good to be aware of.

SNCB & NS: Tickets we offer are the international offering, which means a longer planning horizon (more than 30 days), but no off-peak or low flex discounts.
Deutsche Bahn: Tickets we sell are issued by SNCB. Tickets are offered for DB and regional trains within Germany and Eurocity trains to and from Germany, meaning through-tickets to other operators in neighboring countries are not available.
ÖBB Nightjet: Tickets we sell are issued by SNCB. Availability is sometimes limited compared to ÖBB’s own sales channels. Connecting tickets in Austria are not available.
Eurocity and Railjet from Germany via Austria to Italy (Brenner route): Tickets we sell are issued by SNCB. It’s not possible to buy these as a single ticket that includes a DB or ÖBB connection.

We are working to remove these limitations and offer the full line of tickets for all operators.

Important features we’re working on

While in our Beta version, we're still missing some features that we ourselves really think should be part of a great booking site. We're working to bring you the following features as soon as we can.

Some trips might not yet work to book, for example if a train changes train number during its route or when a set of carriages are connected to different trains along their route (coach groups).
Detailed information on why a ticket is not available—and information on where to find tickets that aren't sold online or that we don't yet sell.
Refunds for refundable tickets available online (contact our support if you need to refund a ticket today).
Exchanges for exchangeable tickets available online (contact our support if you need to exchange a ticket today).
Interrail reservations.
Improved information about services on each train.
Detailed information about comfort & ticket classes when selecting your tickets.
Possibility to choose seat preferences (window seat, etc), both when a graphical seat map is available and not.
See all your bookings and tickets when logged in (bookings are already added to your account when logged in, but not yet shown).