I haven't done the trip but know someone who did to Alicante:

Eurostar London to Paris
Overnight sleeper Paris to Barcelona
RENFE Barcelona to Alicante

Then you will need the FGV from Alicante back to Benidorm.

How long would that take? Sounds fun.

Eurostar London to Paris 2.5 HOURS
Overnight sleeper Paris to Barcelona 11 HOURS
RENFE Barcelona to Alicante 4 HOURS

Plus transfer times in Paris & Barcelona then Alicante to Benidorm.

Add onto that, depending which part of Yorkshire you're departing from, another 2 hours to London, if you go the Doncaster -London Kings X -Edinburgh route, or anything between 2 ½ and 3 hours on the slower Sheffield to St Pancras route.

= A day.?

Sanji x

= A day.?

But it's not just about getting from A to B. I looked into travelling to Seville by train and have decided that I'm going to give it a go the next time I make the trip. Late afternoon departure on the Eurostar and board the 'train hotel' to Barcelona where the all inclusive fare inlcudes a private cabin with en-suite, 3 course dinner in the restaurant car as the train leaves Paris and an early breakfast just before arriving in Barcelona, express train to Seville arriving there in time for a late lunch. Comfort, good food no worries about luggage allowances, hanging around airports etc. Yes, it may take a bit longer but a much nicer way to travel.

A friend and I are planning on visiting Berlin in late June, nearly 30 yrs since we were last there as students and we're doing that by train! We did think about an evening Eurostar in order to get the overnight Paris - Berlin sleeper but decided on getting an early Eurostar train to Paris to pick up the express to Cologne followed by the express to Berlin. Bit of faff with two changes but at an all in APEX ticket from Deutches Bahn for 49 Euros each way St Pancras to Berlin we decided that it was worth the faff. Yes, it will take around 10 hrs in total but by the time you allow for the time we'd spend travelling to the airport, queuing to check in, queing for security, hanging around waiting for the luggage to come off at the other end, travelling into the centre of Berlin from either Tagel or Tempelhof, it's still going to take the best of 10 hrs to fly. This way we're city centre to city centre having travelled in comfort rather than cattle class and arrive in Berlin a 10mins walk from our hotel. It's not just about speed, it's about the overall experience of the journey

SM

SMa, I would love to know where you got those prices. I've never considered a train trip, but that sound awesome!

If anyone can give me a few good websites for cheap train travel, I would be very grateful.

nice to do but i would rather fly.in total 9 hours from house to hotel.thats from getting up and traveling.taxi.fly.bus waiting time.

Hi Pebbles - anybody interested in train travel and the way to get the best fares in Europe needs to make the Man in Seat 61

http://www.seat61.com/

a favourite. Run by a train fanatic and with everything you could possibly ever need to to know about trains. He provides a link into the English version of the Deusche Bahn booking website complete with the details of the times of the trains that their really cheap tickets are valid for already filled in! There's only a limited number of the 49Euro tickets available each day and they can't be booked more than 92 days in advance and they go quickly. Having been trying test bookings it became clear that to stand the best chance of getting them at that price you needed to either book immediately they came available for a particular date or travel mid-week. Tickets for dates that will give you a long weekend in either direction go very fast so we will be doing a Tuesday/Saturday trip in order to take advantage of the cheapest fares but as they go up in 10Euro increments as time goes by you can still get very good prices even if you miss the the very lowest priced ones.

You'll have noticed that we don't have the tickets yet because it's still more than 92 days til the last week in June! But I'm all primed to get on the web and book them immediately it's exactly 92 days before we plan to go and I'll be booking our outward tickets before we can actually book our return ones. Playing with the site I discovered that if you left booking both outbound and return tickets until the date you could buy your return ticket then the 49Euros ones for the outbound journey would be all sold out.

So it could turn into a bit of a gamble but we've decided to go for it and see how we get on. We're going into it with the attitude that this is about doing it because it can be done and if we end up having to pay more to get back well that's OK. And we get to pretend that we're part of the free and easy Interrailing crowd for a few says and also to feel virtuous about our lower carbon footprint compared too if we flew. A bit like the time we decided to fly to Amsterdam for lunch and a quick trip round the Van Gogh museum when EasyJet had an amazing sale on and we realised that we could do a day trip over there for under £40 - in the days before the various taxes and duties on air travel started to add up to more that that And before we started to worry about global warming and our carbon emissions!

Apologies for taking this off the original topic but my excuse if that the OP will find lots of helpful tips at seat61 too for his possible trip by rail to Benidorm.

SM

Thanks very much. I'll look into that.

thank you everyone .. will let you know how i get on..

sanji wrote:

Add onto that, depending which part of Yorkshire you're departing from, another 2 hours to London, if you go the Doncaster -London Kings X -Edinburgh route, or anything between 2 ½ and 3 hours on the slower Sheffield to St Pancreas route.

= A day.?

Sanji x

The people I know who did this round trip said NEVER AGAIN!

Nobody has said yet what approx cost return would be . Say from London / Benidorm & back. If its cheap we will have Robbinair a bit worried and worth a try because this so called LOWCOST flights are a BIG JOKE, nothing like when they started out .

the reason we want to go by train is....my wife will not fly anymore and to go by coach is approx 36 hours.

Be interested to hear how it works out, I have a friend in the UK whose wife also won't fly and they want to visit his brother who lives in Barcelona.

How times have changed, many years ago when I first started to travel the train or coach was the only way to go, You could get short hops over the channel, Southend-Ostend and I think Lydd - Beauvais but the package tours industry was in it's infancy and companies would use a mixture of short flights, coaches and sometimes trains to get to their destinations.
I think it was in 1960 that I went to Greece with a friend on an 18-30 group holiday.We left Nottingham at 5am my mother drove us down the A1 to London where we caught a coach to I think Lydd where we caught a plane (Old DC-3) across the channel to Beauvais. Coach or train (I can't remember) into Paris where we spent a few hours before catching the overnight train to Milan (Normal carriage not a sleeper) we then caught a train to Ancona where we spent the night in a hotel before catching a train the next day to Brindisi, we then caught the overnight ferry to Patras and then a coach to our final destination on the Pelopponese. In all we had been travelling 88hrs with a 12 hour break in the middle. Two weeks later we did pretty much the same on our return but with one overnight on the Ferry and two on trains. I can't remember being extremely tired, it was all an adventure. It's all so easy now.

Nobody has said yet what approx cost return would be . Say from London / Benidorm & back. If its cheap we will have Robbinair a bit worried and worth a try because this so called LOWCOST flights are a BIG JOKE, nothing like when they started out .

It's difficult to put a price on the journey, even an average price because rail fares (including Eurostar) differ greatly between time of booking, time of travel & class.
I cannot see it being cheaper than Robbinair and I personally wouldn't entertain the idea, maybe I would have 40 years ago with just a bag on my back, and that's coming from someone who loves travelling by train and detests the whole airport experience, and you're not going to see much scenery on the overnight TALGO train.

When we went from Yorkshire to Australia, I booked as soon as the dates were available on-line for Doncaster to Kings X, and I dropped on a price of £34 each single in 1st class, but that price tied me down to a specific train and so I didn't book return because anything could have delayed us between Sydney-Hong Kong and Heathrow, and anyway I couldn't have booked because the calendar didn't go forward another 7 weeks to allow me to book that far in advance, consequently it cost £120 to get back from London to Doncaster (2nd class- off peak), so the return journey for two was £188. "¦..And that's just travelling in the UK from Doncaster to London, so gawd knows what the final amount will be when you've totted up the Eurostar, train from Paris to Barcelona etc.
As much as I love train journeys, I'm afraid hanging around stations waiting for connections is not my cuppa tea anymore"¦.not even for Beni.

Sanji

How times have changed

They certainly have! I must be a little youmger than you, Judith, though not by much and remember what an adventure it was going abroad for the first time in my early teens in the early 60s to Interlaken. First train of the day from Liverpool to Euston, bus across London to Victoria, train to Dover, ferry to Calais, overnight train all the way to Interlaken (in an ordinary carrriage in a corridor train - not even a couchette!) arriving in time for a latish breakfast as the gasthof. I can still remember waking up, having stretched out to sleep on the floor between the facing bench seats and looking up to see this upside view of the Alps looking pink in the dawn light - I;d had the sens not to sleep with my head nearest the door into the compartment :-) Magic and the start of my lifelong love affair with long distance train travel.

And anything these days in Europe is going to be comfier than spending 36 hrs (2 nights and the day inbetween) travelling 'hard class' across' China in the very early 80s. And I look back on even that journey with fond memories!

But back on topic re the cost from Doncaster to Benidorm, when I priced up travelling from Scotland to Seville, it came in at just over £200. This was based on me getting the sleeper to London and back - at £19 each way in a bargain berth it's the cheapest way for me to get to London - I'd have combined the trip with staying overnight in each direction with different friends which I know isn't an option for everybody. So, yes, more expensive than a cheap flight but as you couldn't fly to Seville direct from Edinburgh or Glasgow I was always going to have the additional cost of getting to an airport down south. And I thought that it wasn't bad given that it included the equivalent of 2 nights dinner, bad and breakfast on the 'train hotel'.

And cheaper than it cost when I was doing the trip for work and they booked me with BA and Iberia routed Edinburgh, Heathrow, Madrid, Seville at over £250 plus the return rail fare to Edinburgh. It was the only way of doing it at the time within a single day and without an overnight stopover near the departure airport. Transiting through two very busy international airports was mentally exhausting. And BA lost the case at Heathrow - luckily on the return trip - and took 3 days to find it and get it back to me!

The other way I've got to Seville was to go via Gatwick with Spanair which still necessitated an overnight stop with friends near Gatwick in each direction because the times of flights meant that it wasn't possible to do it all in a day and it still cost in the region of £160 pounds even without the cost of an overnight hotel stay at the airport. So now that I'm semi-retired and time off work is no longer that much of an issue, a more leisurely journey by train is quite attractive given that in the end the costs aren't that radically different for someone like me who has very little choice re flights from an easy to reach regional airport. Hence why for next visit I'm going to give the train a go - especially now that I have a medical condition that effects my balance and which can mean that the effects of flying on my inner ears now carries the risk of me wobbling around for a couple of days afterwards even before I hit the manzanilla

SM

THE FOXES wrote:

Nobody has said yet what approx cost return would be . Say from London / Benidorm & back. If its cheap we will have Robbinair a bit worried and worth a try because this so called LOWCOST flights are a BIG JOKE, nothing like when they started out .

Using Rail Europe website, departing London St Pancras on 11 May and arriving Barcelona 12 May and then returning 2 weeks later the price came in at £357 standard class on Eurostar and 4 berth on the sleeper. Then add in Barcelona to Alicante and Alicante to Benidorm perhaps another £100.

I doubt Ryanair are the least bit worried about competition from the railways. Using the same dates Stansted to Alicante with 1 bag 20kgs and no priority boarding the return fare is £175 including taxes and admin fee.

Those fares look like the the standard flexible fares which in most cases are the only ones that Rail Europe sell for anything other than travel within FRance because the site uses the French reservation system. They don't sell RENFE's own web or Estrella fares which are a lot cheaper - it's the equivalent of me turning up at Waverley and paying £240 for an open flexible return ticket from Edinburgh to Kings Cross when I can do it for under £35 return if I book the special offer singles as soon as they become available direct with East Coast Trains on their website. buying Rail Europe is the easiest and most convenient option but not the cheapest way of doing it.

johndoe, you'll find lots of helpful info and the best way to get the cheapest fares to Benidorm via Paris and Barcelona at the link below:

http://www.seat61.com/Spain.htm#Alicante

SM

thank you sma.. will look into that site.