Catching the hotel tren from Santiago de Compostela to Madri

[jenipickles]

Hola atodos

My friend and I are very excited to be walking the Camino Frances this July

We have found this forum to be very informative and have drawn upon your experiences and wisdom to help make a few decisions, so thank you all!

One question that I have is this - we were wanting to catch the hotel-tren (the all nighter) from Santiago de Compostela to Madrid on the evening of Thursday 5 September. Does this service run daily? According to the Renfe website it does but when I go to make the booking it says the following:

"For IDA path no direct connection or this train is not running on the requested date, you may wish to consult the same route with transfer". (via Google Translate)

Could somebody please shed some light, I'm guessing that there is a transfer somewhere maybe?? But not sure...

Has anybody done this recently and able to help?

Thank you in advance.
Jen

 

[soopi25]

Hola Jen,

I've gotten a similar error as well and I believe it's because you cannot purchase tickets more than 30 days in advance. I'll be traveling from Santiago to Madrid at the end of June so if this is the case, I'll need to wait till the end of May at the earliest to purchase.

Hope that helps!

 

[todakat]

We just rode the Trenhotel from Santiago to Madrid. It was wonderful and worth the cost. Soopi25 is correct in that the tickets can't be purchased until 30-60 days out from departure date. The train arrives at 10:30 pm and leaves at 10:33 pm. We walked on down from old Santiago early, so we could watch and be prepared. There is a fairly nice cafe inside the train station. We were just there 3 weeks ago and I so wish to be back again!! Buen Camino!!

 

[Whalleyranger]

The error message is because the tickets only go on sale a few weeks prior to departure, so just keep checking back. There are some excellent fares if you book early, although there have been reports on here of people having trouble making bookings using a non-Spanish credit card.
We paid around €90 each for a private room with bunk beds and had thr best night's sleep ever.

 

[yambowski]

We just caught the all nighter last Thursday night in to Madrid. We booked through the Rail Europe site.