That’s probably a pretty good idea. I’d look at a select pass to cover France, Switzerland, Italy and Greece — you’ll need to cover both Italy and Greece to take advantage of the free ferry. Other than for the ferry, you probably really only need to cover Switzerland and France with a railpass, so price the ferry and decide.

You might try using www.railsaver.com Follow the “I have a good idea of my itinerary” route and click “I prefer purchasing railpasses (to point to point tickets) ‘only when it saves money.’”

thanks you are right I checked railsaver and they recommended a 4 country 5 day flexi pass.

I know that it’s theoretically hard to use the Global Pass to an extent that makes it worth the money, but having used it on my trip last year, and having a 3 country 7 day pass this year, I really preferred the former. The freedom felt a lot better, being able to just change where I wanted to go on a whim and only having to worry about couchette reservations. I liked just being able to jump on any train, anywhere without having to worry about using up one of my precious “travel days.” I’m really thinking of just saying to hell with the cost and getting it next year, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

Feicht makes a point. If absolute cheapest is your criteria, then a consecutive day pass usually isn’t the best deal. The basic problem:
You never know which railpass, if any, would have been best until your trip is over and you can compare what you would have paid for the actual tickets to what you did pay for the railpass.

Exactly! And this is coming from someone who basically had a day-by-day itinerary down pat (see my thread in the Fave Places forum ) I still ended up changing a few things here and there, and even ignoring that, there were several times when I would’ve loved to just hop on a train and visit another nearby town for a few hours and come back….but COULDN’T because it would’ve cost me like 40 Euros round trip. I also found myself trying to jam certain things into time frames that didn’t necessarily work just so I could avoid blowing a day on the pass, and ended up having to buy a ticket and do it the next day anyway. Case in point:

We HAD planned to take an early early early train from the Wacken Open Air fest up to Copenhagen, Denmark (using a day on the Selectpass), sleep on the train, and then after checking into our hostel, backtrack 20 mins up to Roskilde to visit the Viking Ship Museum. Problem was 1) our initial departure at 4ish AM got all screwed up because apparently they changed the track of our train from Itzehoe without announcing it, so we got on the wrong train (on the RIGHT track, mind you) and just kinda dozed off, “knowing” that we’d be heading towards Hamburg, where we’d switch. Well, we woke up about an hour later, still sitting there not moving. Great. Finally found out about the track mix-up, and anyway, long story short, we basically got to Copenhagen about 3 hours AFTER we thought we were going to, and as such really didn’t have the time to head to Roskilde. We almost didn’t even go because we had to buy an inordinately expensive ticket to get there and back the next day, but I figured screw it, I’m not going to let Deutsche Bahn cheat me out of going to a place I’ve wanted to see for a few years. BUUUUUUUUUT, if I had had a Globalpass, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway; we could’ve just taken the later train to begin with, actually gotten some sleep the night prior, and just planned to go to Roskilde when we actually did, anyway.

EDIT: I should also note that I don’t know that I’ll ever be doing as many (if any) cheapo intra-Euro flights as I took this year ever again. Grand total was like 3… but it’s crazy because it practically amounts to blowing basically a whole day to get somewhere. First you have to get TO the damn airport, which is usually way outside of town; then you have to get there really early because afterall…. it’s an airport; then you have the flight itself which (barring delays… which are frequent) can be a few hours; and THEN you land again, also way outside your destination town…again. I really think for my next trip I’m going to say to hell with all that and just do night trains (which I did a lot last year) and maybe cruises, if need be (which I haven’t done before). The trains, at least, are cheaper, less hassle, and drop you off usually reasonably close to where you want to be.