While Interrail and Eurail are now pretty much aligned with regard to price and validity, an important difference remains in that, with paper passes, Interrail requires use dates to be fixed at booking, whereas Eurail allows dates to be confirmed later.
I don't know for sure why this is, as later confirmation is clearly possible. My cynical side suggests that it is to nudge people to the mobile pass - with perhaps the judgement that doing this for Eurail would risk too much business, whereas Interrailers can just suck it up
Typically, Eurailpass holders are travelling much further to start their pass than Interailers.
Eurailpasses' main market is USA residents, some of whom live 12 hours by air from London and further from Frankfurt and so on.
In 2024, I gather Eurail sold 57,000 passes to Australians, good considering the population in my country is only 27 million.
It's basically a 30 hour journey (or longer) from leaving a Sydney or Melbourne home to arriving in the UK or Europe, and there's plenty of potential for flights to be cancelled, rescheduled due to delays and so on, this potentially changing the date a holder starts using his or her pass. Speaking for Australians, if we're leisure travellers visiting UK/Europe, it's common to book flights up to 353 days in advance (the maximum airline booking engines allow). Again, there's a fair chance a change of date might be required: someone in the family dies, or is suddenly ill, or the date of a proposed wedding overseas changes.
I have read that 90 per cent of sales are for the mobile pass, but 10 per cent of an overall 1.2 million (Interail plus Eurail) sales worldwide is still a substantial number. I love the paper pass!
