Travel
Flight-free travel: the best new European train routes that will launch in 2023 and 2020
The full list of new routes in Europe, arranged by country.
Train travel in Europe is experiencing a boom as the trend towards flight-free travel grows. renaissance.
The latest inter-country link will connect three cities that are not well-known in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands.
You can reduce your travel costs by changing the way you travel. Carbon footprint. For example, flying between London and Paris emits 14x more CO2 than traveling by train.
Fortunately, many countries in the EU are investing. Railways This new technology provides faster and better connections than ever.
Here are the latest European railways, from budget-friendly night trains to cross-country tracks. Railway routes.
Austria
Nightjet from Vienna to Paris
Austrian national railway company OBB has been a trailblazer in Europe’s sleeper train Nightjet has been bringing back the spirit of revival since 2016. It launched a new route in late 2021. Vienna Paris is reached via Salzburg and Munich.
The journey lasts 14 hours, and is run three times a weeks in both directions. Prices range from EUR30 for a single seat to EUR120 for a private compartment.
In summer 2023 Nightjet New-generation trains will be launched that rival first class flights in terms of comfort. Wireless charging stations, free WiFi, bicycle and ski equipment storage, and private compartments that have their own showers, toilets, and bathrooms are all expected.
Nightjet from Vienna to Genoa, La Spezia and La Spezia
Nightjet’s new timetable for 2023 extended its Vienna/Munich service from Milan to Genoa and La Spezia, Italy. You can continue on to Monaco, Nice, and elsewhere by train. Cinque Terre.
Belgium
European Sleeper: From Amsterdam to Berlin via Brussels
The long-teased European SleeperOn 25 May, a Belgian and Dutch social cooperative launched its first route, from Brussels to Berlin via Amsterdam.
Passengers on the European Sleeper can travel to Paris, London and Warsaw with just one change. The service will be extended to Dresden and Prague in 2024.
****Arriva and SNCB offer a direct service from Liege to Aachen, Maastricht and Maastricht. (December 2023)
A new train service linking Aachen, Germany, Liege, Belgium and Maastricht will be launched.
The project is a collaborative effort between Arriva, a part of the German Deutsche Bahn Group, SNCB (the National Railway Company of Belgium), and NS (Nederlandse Sporwegen).
Czech Republic
CD from Prague to Zurich
In December 2022 the Czech Republic’s national rail operator Ceske drahy launched a new train service. Sleeper service Frankfurt and Basel are included in the route from Prague to Zurich.
You can also find out more about the following: overnight journeyA revival of a service which was closed in 2017 will take less than 14 hours. Travellers can choose from a variety of fares, including six-bed couchettes and deluxe sleeper compartments that include en-suite showers and toilets.
Tickets for a couchette with six beds start at EUR49.90.
France
SNCF trains from Paris to Aurillac (December 2023)
The Paris-Aurillac Night Train, which was taken out of service at the beginning of this century, will be making a comeback in late 2018.
SNCF Voyageurs announced that Le Pyreneen et L’Occitan, night trains, will connect the French capital to the south-central commune as of 10 December 2023.
During the holiday season, a daily train will run between Cantal and the surrounding areas. The rest of the year, the trains will run on Friday and Sunday nights in both directions.
This is part a larger initiative to relaunch night trains in the country, which has included services between Paris and Nice as well as Paris and Lourdes.
TGV from Paris to Berlin (2024)
France and Germany announced a new TGV route between Paris, Germany and Berlin. The route is expected to begin running in 2024.
A trip between the two capitals currently requires travellers to change trains at a different station, such as Cologne or Frankfurt. The new high-speed connection would allow passengers to complete the journey in seven hours.
Midnight Trains from Paris to Venice (2025)
French startup Midnight Trains The European Commission is backing a new night-train service that will connect France and Italy from Paris to Venice, via Milan, starting in 2025. This will make it easier for UK travellers to travel to Italy by train.
Trenitalia: From Paris to Madrid (starts in late 2024)
In December 2022 FS Italiane Group, the owner of Italy’s state-owned national railway Trenitalia, announced plans for a high-speed Frecciarossa Train Connection Between Paris and Madrid.
The new train will connect Paris Barcelona, where a high-speed service already connects the Spanish capital with the city. It is expected to launch by the end of 2024. There are hints that additional services could connect Madrid and Italy via France.
Germany
Snalltaget: From Berlin to Stockholm
Swedish railway company Snalltaget rerouted some of its trains Berlin The train service from Malmo to Stockholm is extended through Hamburg, Denmark and Stockholm. The journey is just under 17 hours long, and prices start at around EUR50 for direct services.
Nightjet from Munich to Genoa & La Spezia
Nightjet’s new timetable for 2023 has extended its Vienna/Munich service from Genoa and La Spezia to Milan. From here, travel to MonacoNice and Cinque Terre are possible.
Nightjet and EuroNight: From Stuttgart to Zagreb, Rijeka and Rijeka
Nightjet’s new schedule for 2023 includes sleeper trains from Munich to Venice, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, starting in Stuttgart, Germany.
The route will also run seasonally to the coastal Croatian The journey takes approximately 15 hours to reach the city of Rijeka.
EuroNight is operated by Croatian Railways HZ, and Slovenian Railways SZ, and the Nightjet service to Venice travels through Munich, Salzburg, and Treviso.
Brussels to Berlin with European sleeper
Details below
Arriva, SNCB, and NS: From Liege to Aachen and Maastricht (December 2023)
Details below
Italy
NTV Italo: From Genoa to Naples
In late 2021, Italian High-speed rail NTV Italo has launched a service in Genoa that connects the port city, located in the northwest of Italy, with the south.
The journey from Genoa Naples It takes about seven hours to get back and costs around EUR80.
Frecciarossa from Milan to Paris
Frecciarossa, the high-speed arm to Italian Trenitalia, the national train operator, has launched a new train between Milan Paris is a great place to visit.
The train is faster and more luxurious than the previous services on this line. It takes just under seven-hours. Tickets start at EUR29, but you can spend more on an executive fare for a comfortable armchair.
Portugal
Porto to Lisbon, Vigo and the Iberian High-Speed Rail Network Construction to begin in 2024
Portugal The government has approved plans to build a high-speed railway line between Lisbon, Porto, and Vigo. It will be a part of a wider Iberian high speed rail network that connects Portugal with Spain.
At the moment, it takes nearly three hours to travel between Porto and Lisbon. The new rail link will reduce the journey time from 2 hours to only 1 hour and 15 minutes. The new line will eventually connect the Portuguese cities to Vigo in Spain.
Netherlands
Amsterdam to Austria with TUI Ski Express
Snow sports Lovers are preparing for the launch of a new overnight rail service between Amsterdam and some Austria’s largest ski resorts.
TUI’s ‘Ski ExpressThe service will leave Amsterdam every Friday between 23 December and the 31 March. After leaving the Dutch capital, at 5:30pm, this service will stop in Utrecht before continuing directly to Austria.
Nightjet from Amsterdam to Zurich
Austrian-led Night Trains Nightjet has launched a new route between Amsterdam and Zurich in late 2021. It departs at 8.30pm, and arrives at 8:05am.
From couchettes (starting at around EUR60) up to sleeper cabins starting at around EUR120, there are many options for sleeping.
Arriva, SNCB, and NS: From Liege to Aachen and Maastricht (December 2023)
Details below
Amsterdam to Barcelona with European sleeper (Spring 2025)
The soon-to-launch Dutch and Belgian train operator European Sleeper is hoping to launch a night train service between Amsterdam and Barcelona Spring 2025. This would greatly improve the north-south rail links in Europe.
Spain
Madrid to Alicante with Ouigo, Avlo, and Iryo
In November 2022, SNCF will own Ouigo Launched a new low-cost, high-speed route between Madrid and Valencia. In summer 2023, it will also be running to Alicante. Tickets will initially cost EUR9 for one-way travel with one suitcase. After the launch period, tickets will cost EUR30.
Aryo, a low-cost operator of Renfe, will launch its own Madrid-Alicante service starting on 27th March at EUR7. Iryo will launch the same service on 2nd June.
In 2023-2024, Ouigo plans on expanding its service to Cordoba and Seville.
Barcelona to Madrid with Iryo
Traveling between SpainThis new high-speed train service from Iryo will make the journey between’s capital city and its top tourist destination faster and cheaper by November 2022.
Iryo, a consortium formed by Air Nostrum of Spain and Trenitalia of Italy, runs 16 return trains between Barcelona and Madrid every day. The journey takes just 2.5 hours and costs only EUR18.
The low-cost rail service will launch a new service between 31 March 2023. MalagaThe journey between Madrid and Cordoba takes three hours. Avlo, Renfe’s Avlo, will link Madrid to Malaga and Seville from June 2023.
Renfe: From Madrid to Marseille via Barcelona (starts in mid-2023)
In 2023, the state-owned rail network of Spain will launch new high speed AVE services from France. The trains will initially run alternate days, but later they will be increased to twice daily.
Renfe from Barcelona to Lyon via Montpellier & Nimes (mid 2023)
Renfe plans to extend its rail services into France, including a new route between Barcelona and Lyon that will be launched later this year.
By the end of this year, we expect to see more routes to Paris.
Slovenia
Hungarian Railways: Ljubljana-Budapest
The Hungarian Railways train will launch in December 2021 from Ljubljana to Budapest. Hungary The scenic route runs through Graz, Austria. The journey takes about 7.5 hours, and prices as low as EUR16 per way.
Sweden
SJ EuroNight: From Stockholm to Hamburg
The Stockholm Central to Hamburg-Altona train will be launched in September 2022. Night train It is powered by renewable energies. It departs daily from 5.30pm to arrive at 6.30am.
The cheapest option (starting at EUR25) is a seat on a carriage. A bed in a compartment shared starts at EUR45. A private compartment with sink for two people starts at EUR165. Private compartments with a shower, toilet, and breakfast are available for up to three people starting at EUR205. Pet-friendly There are also compartments for trains.
The service can be used in conjunction with existing Eurostar or Deutsche Bahn services to travel from London Stockholm in less than 24 Hours
Switzerland
Nightjet from Zurich to Rome
Nightjet announced at a press conference in 2020 that it will launch a brand new night flight. Trains Zurich and Rome will be connected in winter 2022. It remains to be determined whether the plans will proceed as planned. The operator’s only option is to use the existing network. Rome The routes include Vienna, Salzburg Villach and Munich.
UK
London to Bordeaux via HS1 (approximately 2026)
High Speed 1 (HS1) in the UK, which operates the Channel Tunnel rail line, is preparing to launch a brand new route from London. Passengers must travel through Paris in order to reach the French wine region. The journey takes almost six hours. The new line will bypass Paris and reduce travel time to five hours.
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Travel
A 4-year cruise or a €1 house in Italy: Inside the schemes helping Americans skip Trump’s presidency
Searches by Americans for moving abroad soared in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.
Following the recent US election result, Google searches for ‘how to move to Europe’ increased by more than 1,000 per cent in some countries.
Searches by Americans for moving to Canada and Australia soared by 1,270 and 820 per cent respectively in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.
The interest in leaving the States has not gone unnoticed by marketing firms.
A residential cruise ship is now offering Americans a four-year ‘escape’ trip while a Sardinian village has relaunched its €1 house scheme.
Cruise company offers four-year escape from Trump
Cruise firm Villa Vie Residences is marketing a four-year round the world trip to Americans looking to skip Donald Trump’s second term as president.
The Tour La Vie programme offers passengers a stay of up to four years onboard while visiting 140 countries – which doesn’t include the US.
The irreverently named packages include a one-year ‘Escape from Reality’ cruise, a two-year ‘Mid-Term Selection’ option, a three-year ‘Everywhere but Home’ cruise, and the four-year ‘Skip Forward’ trip.
Guests would join the Villa Vie Odyssey, a residential cruise ship which set sail from Belfast in September, several months into its voyage.
“We came up with this marketing campaign before we even knew who would win. Regardless of who would have won, you would have half of the population upset,” CEO Mikael Petterson told US news site Newsweek.
“Quite frankly, we don’t have a political view one way or the other. We just wanted to give people who feel threatened to have a way to get out.”
Prices start at a little under $40,000 (€38,000) a year. For those opting for the full four-year escape, single-occupancy cabins start at $256,000 (€243,000) while double-occupancy costs up to $320,000 (€303,000).
The price includes all food and drinks (alcohol only at dinner), WiFi, medical visits, weekly housekeeping service and bi-weekly laundry.
Sardinian village relaunches €1 house scheme for Americans
In rural Sardinia, the village of Ollolai has revived its €1 house scheme, now targeting Americans exhausted by the election.
The homes-for-the-price-of-an-espresso offer has been relaunched for US citizens “worned [sic] out by global politics” and “looking to embrace a more balanced lifestyle”, local authorities write on the village’s website.
“Of course, we can’t specifically mention the name of one US president who just got elected, but we all know that he’s the one from whom many Americans want to get away from now and leave the country,” village mayor Francesco Columbo told US news site CNN.
“We have specifically created this website now to meet US post-elections relocation needs.”
Those needs include slowing down and recharging with Ollolai’s dreamy Mediterranean lifestyle.
“Nestled in pristine nature, surrounded by incredible cuisine, and immersed in a community with ancient traditions in the rare Earth’s Blue Zone, Ollolai is the perfect destination to reconnect, recharge and embrace a new way of life,” the website claims.
Available properties will soon be listed online with prices ranging from €1 for houses needing substantial renovations to €100,000 for those that are ready to live in.
This is not the first time the village in Sardinia has put houses for a pittance on the market. In a bid to halt a steep population decline, Ollolai began selling off abandoned homes in 2018 to people willing to carry out $25,000 (€24,000) of renovations within a three-year timespan.
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Catalonia has said they want to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 holiday lets in the next 5 years.
Catalonia’s recent ban on Airbnb-style holiday rentals breaches EU law, according to a complaint filed with the European Commission by an industry group.
The European Holiday Home Association claims that the ban, introduced by Catalonia in June this year, breaches the provision of services directive.
The Spanish region announced that they wanted to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 tourist flat licences over the next five years. The city has not granted new licences since 2014 but this has not helped to stem a housing crisis, with locals saying they can not find places to live at affordable prices.
Why has Barcelona’s Airbnb ban been challenged?
“We are convinced that EU law has not been respected,” Viktorija Molnar, Secretary General of the European Holiday Home Association (EHHA), said in a statement released on Wednesday.
“By submitting the EU complaint, we hope that the European Commission will take a step further and open a formal infringement procedure against Spain,” added Molnar, whose group represents short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Expedia’s Vrbo.
The move follows legal concerns raised by the European Commission itself that restrictions brought in by the Spanish region were disproportionate to the aim of tackling housing shortages.
EHHA argues that “unjustified, disproportionate and unsuitable” restrictions breach the EU’s Services Directive, which regulates a swathe of activities from hotels to legal advice. They also said that claims about the impact of Airbnb on housing affordability are “politically inflamed”.
The lobby group may have support from the European Commission itself, whose officials wrote to Spanish authorities to protest the law in February according to a document seen by Euronews Travel.
“The Commission services consider that the restrictions laid down in [Catalonia’s] Decree-law 3/2023 are not suitable to attain the objective of fighting housing shortage and are disproportionate to that objective,” the document said.
Spanish authorities could have also considered less swingeing restrictions and hadn’t offered evidence that short-term rentals were responsible for housing market tensions, it added – noting that there were three times as many empty dwellings as tourist rental properties in Catalonia.
Barcelona is just one European holiday destinations trying to find ways to tackle overtourism.
Cities like Venice have banned cruise ships from stopping on their shores, Athens regularly restricts visitor numbers at the famous Acropolis and Amsterdam is moving its red light district out of the city centre to try and clean up its image.
How the European Commission is taking on holiday rentals
Brussels has already taken action to bring the sharing economy within the regulatory fold, offering new rights to platform workers and hiking value-added tax on short-term lets and ridesharing apps such as Uber.
But the issue could prove totemic for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – who has created the first-ever European Commissioner for Housing as part of her second mandate, set to take office within weeks.
She has told Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen to “tackle systemic issues with short-term accommodation rentals”, in a mission letter that handed him the housing brief alongside responsibility for energy policy.
A spokesperson for the Catalan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CORRECTION(20 November, 10:02): corrects spelling of Molnar’s name
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The move has been criticised by other tech companies who have branded Microsoft as being a “panic mode”.
In opening remarks to a company conference in the United States on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has set the stage for where the company is taking its artificial intelligence (AI) business.
AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI (GenAI) chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on people’s behalf.
But the cost of building and running AI tools is so high that more investors are questioning whether the technology’s promise is overblown.
Microsoft said last month that it’s preparing for a world where “every organisation will have a constellation of agents – ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous”.
Microsoft elaborated in a blog post Tuesday that such autonomous agents “can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors”.
Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference caters to its big business customers.
Microsoft criticised
The pivot toward so-called “agentic AI” comes as some users are seeing limits to the large language models behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s own Copilot.
Those systems work by predicting the most plausible next word in a sentence and are good at certain writing-based work tasks.
But tech companies have been working to build AI tools that are better at longer-range planning and reasoning so they can access the web or control computers and perform tasks on their own on a user’s behalf.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce also has its “Agentforce” service that uses AI in sales, marketing, and other tasks.
“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff said in a social media post last month. He went on to claim that Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, called Copilot, is “a flop” that is inaccurate and spills corporate data.
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