Germany rail tickets
 

I recently returned from Germany. I purchased my rail tickets ahead of time online. The other participants in my group purchased their tickets at the train stations as needed. I paid three times online what they paid at the station. We had no trouble getting seats (we also were able to put our bikes on the train with no problem) and I didn’t even sit in the seat written on my ticket. What is the advantage of purchasing a train ticket in advance?

Did you purchase from RailEurope? They make a tidy profit.

Advance purchase tix from www.bahn.de have saved travelers a lot of money over tix purchased at counters on the spot.

Groups like yours can save heavily, however, by purchasing Länder Tickets for regional travel in Germany; you can stay on the train all day if you want for about 5 Euros if you share a Länder Ticket with 4 others. Maybe your friends did that.

Yep, Rail Europe was the site I purchased my tickets. I pre purchased tickets to go from Frankfurt Airport to our meenting destination in Luxumburg. Close to $200. It was when we purchased tickets at the train staions to get out of the rain on our bikes that I saw the difference in price. Thanks for the info. I will never use Rail Europe again

Just for fun I checked the DB prices at

http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en

FRA - Luxembourg tix are 55 Euros (normal price) on the fast IC trains, 46 on the regional trains.

RailEurope prices make German Railpasses quite the bargain; you can get a 4-day railpass for as little as $215.

Well, at least your post is here for posterity to help future travelers avoid RE.

HI J,

Did you buy your tickets from www.bahn.de, the German National Railway, or from someone else?

((I))

Since RailEurope is the North American marketing arm jointly owned by the SNCF and SBB you can thank the railways for the profits they made.

There are advantages of bbuying SOME tickets in advance such as on popular night trains, etc., as well as on day trains on some holidays and even during non-holidays.

the last time we took an ICE from Cologne to Hannover, for example, it was a Friday afternoon and the train was jammed with folks standing and sitting in the passageways who couldn't get a seat and it made me doubly glad we had gotten ours in advance.

I have used RE when the price was pretty much the same as I found on the railway sites and there have been times when I compared prices and the RE prices were marked up considerably.

I stopped using them some time ago and now get my tickets by mail from the Bahn site whenever possible.

Thanks for your resposes. In the future I will just use the ticket machies in the train stations or purchase from bahn.de if I need to get to the airport. I was just looking at my ticket I purchased from RE and it cost me $56 to go from Koblenz to Frankfurt. Of course I should also keep in mind the prices at the stations were in euros.

Not using Rail Europe and not using travelers' checks seems to be one idea that persists despite our best efforts on this forum to dispel those ideas.

Not only did you pay a gosh awful price, you probably could have saved even more at the dB site by buying a few days in advance.

Take this one for example:
Hamburg - Berlin. Normal price €65.00 (faster connection), €29 savings fare bought in advance for a specific train.

RE wants $123. The ���€29 ticket right now in dollars is about $46.
The €65 ticket is about $102.
Not too bad a mark up, but you don;t have the opportunity to buy the cheap fare which I have bought and printed myself at home on my own printer using regular typewriter paper, A4.

OOPS let me rephrase that.
Using Rail Europe and using travelers' checks seem to be TWO idea that we cannot dispel despite our best efforts on this forum.

Darn, did it again.

But at times Raileurope may be cheaper on some German tickets - such as some premium ICE trains so don't make blanket statements

often more but not always

RE fares for Frankfurt-Luxembourg run: $95, $132, $120, $112 depending on route and train

and bahn.de has 64.40 euros for fastest connections or $100 - three times?

how does that make them 3 times as expensive as at the station in Germany?

I checked several trains

Munich-Berlin RE charges $193 vs DB 109 euros or about $180 - is this three times the price

Frankfurt-Hamburg RE $191 vs DB 101 euros or $165 - not nearly three times

please show me even one train where RE charges three times for which you would pay for a full fare ticket at the station prior to the train (not online discounts as OP was referring to tickets bought at the station - full fare i presume

Yes RE charges more usually but not all that much it seems on most trains and certainly not THREE times - let's not exaggerate - or show me where RE routinely charges even twice what a fully flexible ticket bought at the station would cost - the same type of ticket RE sells.

I was just looking at my ticket I purchased from RE and it cost me $56 to go from Koblenz to Frankfurt.

and bahn.de charges up to 25 euros for this ticket or about $40

and these are regional trains mainly and on these RE's price differential can be more than on ICEs because RE has a base amount they add to every ticket - the same $7 or so and so on shorter cheaper trips this skews the price differential a bit

If you bought a $10 ticket it would be $17, etc.

But on most trains like ICEs RE's prices are not nearly three times or even double but maybe 10% higher - if my albeit quick check shows anything

I'll do a more exhaustive check and report back.

RE gets dissed for good reason on here and also gets dissed for exaggerated reasons IME - IMO they are not the evil monster OP makes them out but a business selling a product with a modest mark up

again the 29 euro specials are a different creature and RE does not purport to compete with those online only specials - non-changeable non-refundable but sells fully flexible tickets in Germany i believe and that's what the comparison should be make between - not apples and oranges.

That said of course you can save a ton of money by locking yourself in to these not always available tickets at wwww.bahn.de - that i am not disputing

I agree, I wouldn't say that is such an awful price if it's $56 versus $40. I spent about an hour at a rail station in Dresden once getting a simple ticket due to lines, so that might have been worth $16 to me.

I've seen some tickets where the markup wasn't that horrible at all, it wasn't anything like some complaints -- maybe 25 pct or so. A lot of people don't know how to use foreign rail websites and don't know how to buy tickets -- or they buy restricted tickets and then expect them to be refundable, things like that. If you haven't traveled at all, you can not understand these things, some people don't even know how to "use" a train, for example.

Surely paying $56 rather than $40 means that you pay $140 rather than $100? Some folks (me, for example!) think that a 40% markup is 'awful', when, as stated above, tickets can be bought easily from a machine at most German stations for most trains.

You can purchase from RailEurope a p2p ticket from Koblenz to Luxembourg on the 8:22 RE for $65 (plus shipping, as much as $18).

Two people can ride on that same train with a Rheinland-Pfalz-Ticket for €13,00 each; that's about $20 pP.

That sounds like a <u>little more</u> than 3 times.

For three people, it would be less than &euro;9 each, less than $14. That's over 4 times.

&gt;&gt;RE ... sells fully flexible tickets in Germany.

Oh? first, Read the &quot;detail&quot; under the Munich-Berlin fares on the RE website. &quot;This fare is non-refundable and non-exchangeable.&quot;

I don't quite know how to reconcile that statement with the one under
&quot;General Ticket Fare Rules&quot; shown under details. It says all <u>cancellation</u> must be received before the first day of validity at the issuing office and are subject to a 15% penalty and a 5% administration fee, so you stand to lose almost as much on the <u>fully flexible</u> tickets from RE as you do if you don't use on the Dauer-Spezial fares.

The real comparison should be between RE tickets and the discount Bahn tickets, not the fully flexible, full fare Bahn tickets.

Larry - yes i now note that RE has changed their rules on German tickets - not long ago they were fully flexible and i did not take note of the change. thanks

the 3 times the OP said was for her tickets thru RE and ones bought at stations - and i can see none comparing Re and bahn.de that nearly are twice let alone three times and that's what i was disputing

not the online fares - but RE tickets vs those bought at stations like the OP said

In any case fully flexible fares on bahn.de show why a German Railpass can be a great boon even for just two trips between say Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich- for those wishing flexibility to take any train and take the fastest ones.

Sure the Shoenes Weekend things, etc are much cheaper but you may need all weekend to take them as i believe you cannot take the faster ICE trains

&quot;Sure the Shoenes Weekend things, etc are much cheaper but you may need all weekend to take them as i believe you cannot take the faster ICE trains&quot;

All weekend?? Faster trains are disallowed - but on the route in question, FRA-Luxemburg, there are limited fast train options because of the terrain, and regional trains are just as / nearly as fast anyway. You might find a difference of 20-30 minutes. In this case RailEurope vs SW ticket is an appropriate comparison.

My comparison with the weekend ticket were for Frankfurt-Berlin-Munich which i was talking about - not the Frankfurt-luxembourg yes where mainly non ICE trains are involved.

&gt;&gt;the 3 times the OP said was for her tickets thru RE and ones bought at stations - and i can see none comparing.

You can't say that anymore.

The last time my wife went with me to Germany, we flew into Stuttgart and immediately took the train to Rothenburg ob der Tauber using a
Baden-W&uuml;rttemberg- and a Bayern-Ticket. After two days, we went to Berchtesgaden using a Bayern-Ticket, then to near Oberstdorf, also with a Bayern-Ticket. We spent a week in the Oberallg&auml;u region using an Urlaub-Ticket for local train and bus travel, but I won't count the saving there because I would have done it that way requardless. One day we made a round trip to Lindau using a Bayern-Ticket. We left on a saturday and used a Sch&ouml;nes-Wochenende-Ticket to go to Sigmaringen via Ulm. From Sigmaringen we used local transit to get back to Stuttgart.

Final count, we used 4 Bayern, 1 Baden-W&uuml;rttemberg, and 1 Sch&ouml;nes-Wochenende-Ticket on 5 days. I bought them at the Bahnhof on the day of travel. At todays prices we would have spent &euro;170. My bank charges just 1% over the interbank rate plus $1.50, so the tickets would have actually cost me about $270.

Today a 5 day German Rail Twin from RE is $480 - almost twice what I would have actually spent.

I went to RE and looked up the ticket prices from them for all the legs we traveled. Because RE doesn't sell ticket on all routes, I would have had to ticket Ulm to Sigmaringen via Friedrichshafen.

If I bought all my tickets for those five days of travel from RailEurope, the total today comes to $972 (plus shipping).

The $972 from RE is 3.6 times what I actually paid buying tickets at the station on the day of travel.

larry - Rail Europe does sell fully flexible open tickets after all - talking to Byron at BETS (800-441-2387), a RailEurope agent, he just told me that they do issue fully flexible open tickets for Germany - he explained that the info on RE web site is inaccurate and applies only to the seat reservation which is included with most fares where seats are reservable

(RE takes the fare and adds $11 onto it automatically for a reserved seat) and this is why the site says non-refundable, non-exchangeable and he says or at least thinks that that ticket can be used on any other similar train. It is not refundable however but apparently fully flexible. Anyway he says they do issue fully flexible open tickets in Germany thru RailEurope.)

It is clear that RE can and BETS do issue fully flexible German tickets - but i don't know about the wording on the web site about non-exchangeable from the train reserved - whether indeed it can be used on another train like Byron suspects but is not sure.

BTW - this is just for clarification as i think you want to know all policies - i applaud you for your efforts at highlighting the cheaper fares - esp the regional or Lander passes that are so useful for folks staying in one region, etc.

And please repeat your new web site - i forgot to bookmark it and want to see it (for others Larry has compiled beaucoup tips on German trains on his own web site)

Cheers

BTW, in pricing tickets from RE, I was careful to only look at the fare for all-regional connection, the types of trains I would have ridden with the L&auml;nder-Tickets.

For Rothenburg to Berchtesgaden, the 9:06 train connection out of Roth odT to Munich, changing in Steinach and Treuchtlingen, is all regional and costs $144 for two from RE. The only afternoon connection from Munich to Berchtesgaden shown by RE is via IC. However, it arrives later than the regional connections shown on Bahn.de, and the fare $112 for two, is the same.

So, Rothenburg to Berchtesgaden tickets from RE would cost $256; we did it with a Bayern-Ticket for &euro;27, $43. The RE tickets would cost almost <b>6 times</b> as much.

The trains on these routes are almost entirely regional. There were only a couple places where express trains (which we could have used with a railpass) would have saved any time. Those time savings came to 1hr 31min over the entire 5 days.

I personally would rather ride regional trains than ICEs, which are often quite full and don't stop much

I love the regional trains that are often sparsely full - unless the not unusual school kids mob on board as has happened quite a few times and even this is fun to see how German kids act, etc. (about the same as Americans - loud and moving around a lot)

But if i were doing Berlin to Munich i'd much rather take the ICE since the distance is so long

But for shorter hauls i'd rather be on a regional train than an ICE - i also love to stop at sleepy stations and see folks getting on and off, etc.

To me the train ride is my trip - the cities or stops in between are mere footnotes.

The Bayern Ticket is subsidized by the state of Bavaria for a number of reasons.
It's just not fair to compare a ticket subsidized by tax money with a standard rail ticket, is it?

Logos, it is a fair (fare) comparison if <u>I</u> am buying the ticket.

Anyway, I imagine the subsidy is a lump sum to run the trains. I have never used a Bayern-Ticket on a regional train that did not have seats available (usually lots of them), so I figure my presence increases their revenue (or decreases the subsidy) over if I were not there.

So, as for that ticket from Munich to Berlin, you can go online in advance and buy it from RailEurope for $193 (plus as much as $18 for shipping), and if you miss the train it will cost you at least $38.60 (and they won't refund shipping) to &quot;get&quot; your money back, or can go online in advance to Bahn.de and buy it for $46.40 on a Dauer-Special, and the most you could lose is $46.40.

Actually, this is a case where you would be better off going to Bahn.de and buying a full fare, standard ticket, really fully flexible, no 20% refund charge.

Someone recently wrote in about buying a ticket for three or four people from RE. One person decided not to go, so she tried for a refund. They cancelled the entire ticket (everyone), at 15% or 20% of the total, and wrote a new ticket for one less person. Her refund was actually only 5% or 10% - AND, she had to pay shipping all over again.

I would think the Deutsche Bahn as a whole runs a pretty good defecit - they are often in red ink but i do not know who picks up the tab

&gt;lump sum to run the trains.
The subsidy of the Bavarian state is on those tickets. Lump sum is from Germany. So it makes a difference.

I am glad to report that there's a happy ending to my sad story a while back: I had purchased online from www.bahn.de a ticket from Amsterdam to Hamburg, but it never arrived before we left on our trip at the end of June. When I e-mailed Bahn to ask for their help, they wrote back telling me to buy the ticket in Europe and then send it to them with a request for a refund when we returned home. So I did that. Today my credit card was credited the full amount of the ticket we bought in Amsterdam, which was higher than the one I got online! So I am very happy with Bahn. In the future, though, I wouldn't buy a ticket online unless it were the kind I could print at home. I would just get it in Europe.

Also, thanks to you rail experts, we did buy a Lander ticket for three of us to get from a small rural town to Hamburg, and it saved us quite a bit. Thanks, everyone!

happy ending thank you

For future reference for anyone needing to call Bahn.de the number is (49) 1805 14 15 14 and folks report getting great help in English with just such problems as Jane had.

49 is Germany country code - add 011 from U.S. to get international connection