i'm planning to travel overnight in a 2 sleeper car, from budapest to prague on the 22nd of dec 2014. tried to book on mav-start.hu but there are no offers available. are the tickets all booked up?
The reason here is quite trivial - second weekend of December is the time when almost all the European railways (including Hungarian Railways (MAV) change train schedule. Some companies are a bit lazy and enter new timetable into the system late, that is why for dates after Dec.13 MAV ticket shop doesn't sell train tickets yet. It's a bit difficult to guess when those guys in Hungary will do their job and ticket sale for dates after Dec.13 will be available (it can be tomorrow, but might be even in early December), but you can just visit MAV website time to time and check yourself. Although you should consider the fact that those preholidays period is very busy travel time, so discounted tickets that MAV sell online will be sold out pretty quickly.
i've also tested a few dummy dates and it seems like all the sleeper options are not available but the day rides are.
Hmm... for some dates discounted tickets for sleepers are sold out, but for many other they are still available and can be booked. It should look like this -->
would buying it off bahn.de be the same?
Not really, because a) buying via German Railways (DB) website is more expensive and b) Germans will sell you tickets only for Budapest-Prague-Berlin carriages which arrive to Prague at 4am, so it might be a bit too early for many travelers (MAV website on the other hand sell tickets for Budapest-Prague carriages, which depart from Budapest with the same Budapest-Berlin train, but in the middle of the night get reattached to the other train insuring later arrival to Prague)
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