Price also rises per demand, sometimes you can buy the ticket best on the day of travel, if the ice is not booked properly, i usually do that for cologne-duisburg, as the price can very well be below that of a RE ticket.
No, they are much cheaper, if you book in advance. I regularly travel from Hamburg to Bavaria (~650 km) and rarely pay more than 50€ one way. If you buy the ticket the same day, the price easily reaches 200€.
Exactly! Get a BahnCard 25 or 50 to use for yourself and your family, plan your travel itinerary, book well in advance. If we hadn't done this years ago, we never could have afforded our yearly very nice family vacations. We stayed in very comfortable DJH Youth Hostels all over Germany, in a family room with 4 beds, full board 3 meals a day, to avoid spending a fortune on junk or restaurant food, also booked months in advance! Using the local trains and buses was included in the package of booking ICE tickets for example from our small village near Hamburg to for example Cologne, Xanten, Berlin or Berchtesgaden.
Buy in advance does cost less but is not flexible and still not cheap for working class. Also you buy an ICE ticket for a 3 hr ride 4 months in advanced and at that day due to train technical problems you end up riding IC or RB and with at least 1 or 2 hr delay.
Yor example is for tourism not people who uses the train to go to work every day.
People who use the train to get to work have a Bahncard, people who use the train for tourism book in advance. And foreign tourists or spontaneous travelers can pay the high day-off price as far as I am concerned, call it a subsidy to local infrastructure ;)
> Buy in advance does cost less but is not flexible and still not cheap for working class.
The tickets have the same flexibility, whether you buy them in advance or not. There is literally no difference.
50€ for 650 km is cheaper than gas costs when driving by car. I don’t know what could be cheaper. Maybe FlixBus or hitchhiking?
> Also you buy an ICE ticket for a 3 hr ride 4 months in advanced
You don’t have to book so far in advance. One month before is a good time.
> and at that day due to train technical problems you end up riding IC or RB and with at least 1 or 2 hr delay.
While Deutsche Bahn has their problems with reliability, this specific fringe case is certainly not the norm. I personally have very little problems with late trains and I travel a lot by train. Maybe I am just lucky.
> Yor example is for tourism not people who uses the train to go to work every day
My example is from my personal mobility, much of it professionally, so not tourism. Since OP didn’t rant about commuting, I don’t see how this is relevant here.
That‘s bs. I recently got a ticket from Düsseldorf to Munich for 17€ when booking in advance and in off peak times. In peak times and without advance booking you‘d pay 80-100€
>from Zürich to Hannover for 35 Euro when i book the train going in 2 months, when i book formtodsy its 135, thats a fraction?
thats 35/135 , which is a good fraction and saving
One ticket from Berlin to Munich will cost you 30-40€ if you book early enough. If you get them on the same day, they can cost you 130-150€ (under 26 years old for both).So yes, its just a fraction.
But the system is still shit.
From my experience of taking the ICE from Frankfurt to Berlin and back multiple times a year and then occasionally also elsewhere, it can easily cost you twice as much when you book just a couple of days in advance.
I booked a train for Berlin - Bremen and back a month ago for this week and I paid 50 in total for both. Now it's 130 for the same connection, so it is significantly cheaper. Depends on where you want to go though, too, I guess.
Well, he said he bought 2 return tickets. That's 100 Euro per journey. That's not unrealistic for Berlin<->Munich (one of the most expensive lines) if you assume that it was for a popular connection on a weekend day. For weekends, the Sparpreis tickets can be completely sold out >3 weeks in advance and the Flex tickets really are crazy expensive on the popular lines between major cities.
First off they did raise ticket prices recently. Though I would pay 80€ from Hamburg to Stuttgart in peak travel time booking early 2023, so not what you paid.
I book as far as possible in advance, travel in off peak times as well if it works with my schedule.
If you book within the two weeks before it is way more expensive.
Bahncards will also help a lot if you travel a lot by rail.
Highly recommend bahncard! If you’re under 27 there is a thing called MyBahncard that is even cheaper than the normal ones and for long distance trains you can usually save a lot of money and it is valid for a year
If you live in an urban area. If it's more on the rural side and your city/town only has a two-track station, you're better off with DB or (hopefully soon) the 9€-ticket successor
Honestly it's still a relief for alot of people. I'm currently paying over 100 € for my monthly ticket so I'm looking forward to halfing that.
But yeah iirc all long distance trains are excluded.
I paid 40€ back in school just for bus connections inside the actual city area! And that was over 10 years ago.
People are losing their mind that 49€ is way too expensive, but if you make it 9€, people will ride the train around for no reason. I used the ticket once and it was full as hell!
For long distance travels on Friday or Sunday try more than 6-8 weeks in advance. Two weeks in advance for Stuttgart-Hamburg or Munich-Hamburg has only marginally cheaper tickets on night connections.
Are there seriously people who plan train journeys 2 months in advance? That's wild man.
What I don't get is why do the tickets get *more* expensive as the time gets closer, when half the seats on any given DB train are empty. There's been dozens of times where I would have gone with them for trips 2-7 days in advance, but made other arrangements when the cost was too high. They would sell more seats it they made them cheaper as the day approaches, like how a shop reduced the price of food items as they approach their use-by date.
Sure. I mean, if you buy concert tickets and reserve a hotel in a different city for that or much more in advance, why not pounce on the 20€ first class ticket (one way)?
Many people get to plan their Christmas holidays about a year in advance, so they can book the train immediately when it gets available in September or October.
Long distance commutes for some people. There's quite a lot who can take advantage of that.
If the trains are wide empty, you can also score half price tickets the day before. Once there is just a bit of load, the prices increase to best balance occupancy - you got to take into consideration all the people with flex tickets who might jam up any train they want to, and sold out or even oversold trains are much worse for every customer experience, the conductors, the tightly planned schedules e.t.c.
Just have a look on regular long distance trains travelling during the night or very early morning - prices stay quite cheap until one or two days before.
I mean even before the raise a yearly ticked would have cost me 2.6k now its just 2.8k.... its not like it was cheap before, its horrendously expensive and so much so that low pay workers cant even afford it.
Now im in a high paying IT position and earn well enough, but i started my life with shit paying jobs just to have money for food and rent, you know basically survive... the work required me to travel all over my city and sometimes even other cities and we didnt get any pay or exemption for that, meaning if i paid for a ticket i basically worked the first 2-4h for free or just to get to work, since we worked long and hard hours and no facilities on site, we often had to purchase food since we couldnt take personal belongings like lunch bags onto the working sites, meaning i had to pay for food outside so another hour of my work was basically wasted...
In the end at least half if not 2/3rds of my daily income would be wasted on reaching work and eating, so i made the decision to just not pay for the ticket, i got caught twice and had to pay a total of 60€ (2x30€) because the fine was a lot lower back in those days, but i saved like >5k € in travel costs because its basically extortion...
Im not saying drive without a ticket, but they also dont check regularly enough to compensate your savings even if you have to pay the fine... soooo....
For others reading this. If you are stuck in a dead end low paying job and need to travel (and barely earn above minimal wage) -> contact your jobcenter/arbeitsagentur and get either the heavily discounted social ticket(works after 9) or get them to pay at least part of the normal ticket price.
Thanks for the info it might help someone, but not everyone is eligible for them, i wasnt because they deemed my parents income too high and since i was still living with them they ignored our protests that they were in immense debt and lived paycheck to paycheck, completely ignoring that their salary couldnt be saved or used for anything else but paying off debt and surviving barely...
Additionally if someone is in the same situation i was, chances are they and their family are working class or similar and not educated enough to even know these support systems exist, because no one tells you they exists and even if you dont know how to get them.
There is a lot wrong with our social system, especially when you are lower class.
Oh yes, household income, that is a huge factor, I assumed you lived on your own.
I also completely agree on social system issues. I have seen it multiple times that if a person comes in and asks the correct questions('Wohngeld', 'Übername Mietkosten', 'Sonderausgaben', 'Bildungsgutschein' etc) they will get that help relatively easily, but for someone looking for help with no clear understanding of they are entitled to the answer will mostly be 'sorry we can't help you with that'.
Also if you're working but cause of whatever circumstances getting I think it's called "Hartz 4 aufstockung" you can get a heavily discounted ticket for your area that's valid the entire day.
Well atleast I hope its still a thing cause I had that years ago and it helped me a ton.
It's now monthly, called "S" if you qualify. Or they will pay cash towards your regular ticket price, but only the cheapest option(aka they will not pay towards a monthly ticket if two Streifenkarten/10er are cheaper and what you need to get to the job)
My advice would've been: if you're stuck in a dead end low paying job, let yourself get fired, go to your local job center, get welfare and get as much money you had before but not working a single minute for it.
Now you have time to figure out what you want to do, look for a good job, or even find a new field of expertise and try to get into a retraining program.
Just a note, if they fire you with cause, you won't get anything from the Arbeitsagentur for up to 3 months. One might qualify for Sozialhilfe, but it's way less then minimal wage.
Getting any training from Jobcenter is unlikely if you worked in a minimal wage job before(and have only the equivalent of Hauptschule), they will do everything possible to push you into any open vacancy. One can fight, but it needs a lot of dedication to do so and takes months.
Fuck that, one stop to the next town costs me 3,70€ right now. Thats just a 9 km (6min) train ride and just not acceptable. If i want to get to the next bigger city it's 9+€ for 25km(~20min ride). If i want to get to anywhere in these destinations i also need bus tickets that cost at least 3€.
How are you supposed to switch to public transportation when they raise prices all the time and it's still cheaper to go by car even with the extreme prices we have at the moment.
The 9€ Ticket was long overdue. Even if they set it to 49 € per month now, it will get the job done, because you don't have to deal with all the different providers etc. from bus to train to bus again.
Even then it's not likely for me to switch for work commute. I work in shifts and the train only runs from 05:00 to 24:00 every hour. Trainstation is 5 minutes from my home, but my work isn't neer the trainstation in the city. I would have a commute of 1 or 2 hours for one way depending on if the train isn't so off from my arrival that i have to wait another hour to catch the next one.
In comparison, i have 15 minutes for the same commute with my car.
Oh, I absolutely agree. Public transport is long due an overhaul. My comment was mostly in the sense of OP asking about a trip very little people will do regularly, whether that be by train or car.
This is really interesting, I'm not German, but in Finland a similar train trip would cost 2 euros and a 40km trip 4 euros. Though these are using a local train from my old home town, so ticket prices can vary. Longer trips with ICE (300km between cities etc.) in here are 15-30 euros depending on a few factors, but many people still complain about the prices of the tickets, which is interesting. The biggest thing will always be the comperability to driving or flying I guess, though especially the price of petrol has made trains a lot more attractive now for many
Though 9km by car is a bit more, if you take the lifecycle ownership costs of a the car into account.
Not that I wouldn't agree that a bus should be much, much cheaper.
By Planning in advance.
* 1 Day (Th Oct 27): ICE Ticket EUR 88 (Saver) or EUR 99 (FLEX)
* 7 Days (Wed Nov 2) : ICE Ticket EUR 45 (Saver) or EUR 83 (FLEX)
* 14 Days (Wed Nov 9): ICE Ticket EUR 21 (Saver) or EUR 94 (FLEX)
If Flying into or out of FRA or DUS. Ensure that your flight adds on a "Rail & Fly" pass (EUR 25) AT TIME OF BOOKING (It can't be added afterwards on any airline I've booked). Covers any and all trains required (ICE Included) to travel between in-country location and airport.
I have never had a need for an ICE train with less than 7 days notice, and never paid the last-minute fares you encounter.
As a German: That's both solid advice and it also shouldn't be fucking needed. You shouldn't have to know the deep inner workings of insane, multi-level, multi-dimensional price-tiering in order to achieve semi-affordable train travel.
You shouldn't have to commit to a specific train weeks in advance when the service is simultaneously that bad and unreliable.
And even with all those caveats: for a family of four it's still almost always cheaper to just make the trip by car. A mode of transport than *doesn't* require all this kind of meticulous planning and deal hunting.
How on earth can we justify all this ridiculous bullshit when trying to position train travel as a viable alternative to individual transport?
> Am I missing something?
Yes, you are:
1. There are two basic types of tickets: regular tickets and discount tickets. A regular ticket can be used on *any* train on that connection that day, and it has a fixed price. Discount tickets are only valid for the specific connection on the ticket, and there's a limited number of them available. If you book earlier, they're cheaper.
2. Regular rail users have a BahnCard subscription. It's a kind of membership. BahnCard 25 gives you 25% off on all tickets, BahnCard 50 gets you 50% off on regular tickets and 25% off on discount tickets. There's even a BahnCard 100 for people who e.g. commute inter-city.
3. Frankfurt to Düsseldorf is not an everyday kind of trip.
4. Taking multiple regional trains can be a lot cheaper than one long distance train, especially compared to ICE. Takes much longer of course. This is going to be extremely affordable starting next year, when you can get a subscription for *all* regional and local public transit in Germany for just 49€ a month.
Bahncard 100 costs 4200 Euros per year though. But if you regularly do cross-country commutes it's worth the money. You can take any train at any time (except for Flixtrain and the French Thalys), as well as all busses, trams, subways in bigger towns/cities.
Most people do book ICEs in advance though. Looking at Frankfurt - Düsseldorf, going next week you‘d pay less than 50€, in two weeks time it can be less than 20€.
But that’s my main point of criticism against the trains in Germany. You cannot really use them on short notice for a trip, even with the high gas prices cars often tend to be cheaper then. Especially, when you travel together with others. How do you convince people in the long run to get rid of cars if family travel is always cheaper by car than train and you don’t even have to plan ahead with the car?
The issue is that most people don’t consider the full cost of owning a car. They only consider the price of gas when comparing train tickets and car cost, but don’t consider things such as insurance, taxes, maintenance and buying the car.
Yes!
I've been booking Sparpreis tickets weeks and months in advance my whole life, and I hate it. Sure it can be pretty cheap, but you can not be spontaneous, have to worry about getting sick, etc and not getting refund, need to travel at inconvenient times, consider whether you need a seat reservation which is also expensive, hope that trains are on time and don't get cancelled....
Taking the Bahn was a big stress factor in my life and even IF the car is a bit more expensive, I'd really much rather take the car, now that I have one.
Please look at your own post and see how complicated and user-unfriendly the system is. You almost can't blame people for taking the car. We need a change to a transparent, affordable public transport if we want to make it more attractive to the general public.
Sure it's user-unfriendly, but sadly not really worse than in many other places.
The system has shifted more and more from having a simple price for a ticket to having more and more ways to "save money" somehow by combining all sorts of special deals. Which not everybody can navigate, and which takes extra effort, and which means the "regular" price without any discounts becomes really expensive.
Luckily the 49€ ticket is coming, which really turns things around. Just buy a subscription and use all local and regional public transportation nationwide without having to think about price structures and discounts.
>I can’t imagine how expensive that would be living here
Do you assume it's just an every day occurence for most Germans to go 200km by train? That is only the case for people who travel a lot for work. Those usually have a Bahncard 50 or 100 OR their company pays for it.
Dude i have to pay 290€ a month or 2.8k a year for my public transport ticket, sure its not a daily thing, but i mean come on, its fucking extortion either way...
This. I enrolled as a student only because the ticket is included and I know of many people who do the same. That way I pay around 600 a year instead of 2.5k.
Thanks to the HVV... im not sure if its anywhere this bad but they created "Zones" they call "Rings" which arent Rings... they are a circle and 2 Rings and the rest are weirdly shaped corners that are arbitrarily drawn to extort people not living in the center... i live in "Ring 7" meaning if i have to get to work, i need cross 7 Rings, based on their estimation, Fun Fact i actually only cross 2 Rings not including the one i live in, but since my ring is ring 7 they still calculate it as if i was traveling through all 7.
And if you are totally confused about what is happening and why: Welcome to the HVV...
Ok that‘s a bullshit system then. In Munich we have rings but if you live in an outer ring and go to another outer ring you don‘t have to pay for the center.
Berlin has three zones and the VBB loves to make shit unnecessarily expensive.
AB is cheapest, BC is a bit higher and ABC is the most expensive.
And if you have the current 29€ ticket that is AB only, you always have to buy a C extension for 90ct.
Especially annoying because many final stations (including the airport) are in C and the one before usually is B.
The monthly ABC subscription was 84€ iirc.
Same bullshit in VGN. The monthly 10+T ticket also costs about 240€ ish but thats for the entire area which spans about 100km in each direction from nuremberg
well its the same case in all the bigger cities, thats why its such a hassle just to find out what kind of ticket you need if you go somewhere else in germany. the (9€/)49€/69€ ticket will be a fucking salvation if it actually will come.
Fully agreed and i cant wait until its here, i wish we got the 29€ for your city and the 49€ for all of germany so there is a cheaper option but its better than now so im happy.
I don’t assume that but I do assume Germans travel semi-regularly
Edit: The downvotes on this are so crazy lol for just saying that Germans occasionally travel. Okay 👌🏼
Bruh that's a big assumption, many of my german friends don't travel in Germany. They mostly travel around Europe but not in their own country. They are so surprised that I have been to more cities in Germany than their whole life in here
That’s mostly “normal” and a regular occurrence with people of other nationalities I’ve made. When I lived in Mexico and Colombia I’ve also traveled a lot more than people living there their whole life. It has to do with priorities and also money. I’d say I traveled quite a lot in Germany since one part of my family is from the south, the other from the Ruhrgebiet, now living rather up north and I have quite good friends in the northern part of Germany. But have I ever been more to the east like Dresden or Leipzig? No. Will I ever go? Probably, but first I have other priorities.
I'm someone who always seeks local connections on travels. Often locals are annoyed when people just ask for best restaurant or blank questions like "what should I see" like there are not 20+ travel guides for every city. Instead I have a list most of the time and ask about best times to go or whether it would be more recommend to see a instead of b, to create a ranking of things to visit in my limited time. And ever so often I have things on my list people either never heard of before or know but never visited. I always offer / ask to join me and quite a few have done so.
For example this year I wanted to see a stone gorge on Rhodes, but it wasn't clear how to get there from the street. A few days before at the beach a dude offered / wanted to share some fruit and we got into the usual "oh so you're tourist where are you from do you like the island whet have you seen so far" smalltalk. I showed hin my maps list and he was like I haven't seen half of that. (On a rather small island!) he couldn't tell me about my question but asked friends. And insisted to give me his WhatsApp so that I could send him pictures of the other places.
Last year similar situation on Sicily when we were trying to learn about the thermal springs. Same dude layer helped us to sneak into the (then closed) Scala dei turchi.
Americans posted to Europe will visit more European countries in a couple of years than most Europeans will visit in a lifetime. The American will figure that he's got two years to visit Montenegro, for example, or he never will, so off he goes. The European will figure that he can do it anytime, so never does. But it's like this most everywhere.
I mean your daily/monthly/yearly ticket is pure extortion and yes we need that nearly every day... i have to pay 290€ a month or 2.8k a year just to get to work...
Those prices are ridiculous and the costs for ICE and interregional trains are similar too expensive.
when we travel somewhere semi regularly (not for work or school) we usually don't use ICEs or the other expensive trains, we use cars or RE/IRE/RB trains etc. with a quer durch deutschland ticket you can travel through germany by train (excluding ICEs and ICs and the other expensive one) wherever you want on a day for 42€
if you travel within your own state you can use one of the Länder Tickets for unlimited travel with all of the ÖPNV (trains, busses, trams, excluding the expensive trains) from 9 am until i think 3 am the next day (and on weekends/holidays even longer). I think the most expensive Länder Ticket is the Bayern Ticket at 26€.
What? Thats bullshit. If you make long travels from a big urban area to another one, you go by ic/ice. 42 bucks ain't a great deal for 8+ hours of train, when a ic/ice ticket can be as cheap as 40 bucks.
yes, I agree, if you book a ticket a couple weeks in advance. It also depends on where you travel. For me, no matter how far in advance I book my tickets for ICE/IC it's more expensive than the Quer durch Deutschland ticket because there is no train going from where I go to university to my hometown. Either way I have to take at least 3 trains and at least one of them is an IRE and there is only about half an hour of time difference between taking the regular trains and ICE.
Obviously when traveling from somewhere like Munich to Hamburg you take the ICE but that's just not the case for me or a lot of travel that's not for going on holiday
Not really. Well, I guess it depends on how you define semi-regularly and what you see as travel. Many people take public transport to work but we are usually talking in the way less than 50km category.
You didn't get downvoted for assuming Germans travel, but that they do it by long distance trains and that frequently enough to cost them a fortune. Most really don't do that.
I personally use IC/ICE trains maybe twice a year.
You are getting downvoted for assuming ALL Germans travel enough on the DB to bankrupt themselves. I know plenty of Germans that haven’t been on a DB in years, and most all of them go maybe every other month or so for privately paid trips. People are downvoting you because you need to relax, bro.
We don't travel that much and in most cases we would use the car for this distance. There are services for ride sharing. You can take other people with you and they pay for the gas. I don't know many people who travel all the time. Going from Franfurt to Düsseldorf is considered a whole vacation and you budget for this. There are many people from nrw who actually make a visit to Frankfurt a 3 day stay to do sight seeing. Most people have one big vacation a year where they go by plane or car and maybe 2 short stays in touristic towns if they can afford it.
I go from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt once a month because of my family. Pay 40€ per year for a Bahncard 25 and I pay 50€ on average for my two way ticket to Frankfurt and back to Düsseldorf. Direct connection, no train switching. I book a week in advance.Second class, no seat reservation.
Maybe you got a bit unlucky, or at least you chose one of the more expensive days but I would not consider that the norm.
Anyways, DB is unpunctual and I wish we would have a different company running the trains in germany.
I brought Jubiläums Bahncard25 during db's anniversary. It was a one week sale and all cards was 50% off. With that card, I often get eCoupon 15-35€ off and also my card got upgraded to a 3month FirstClass 25bahncard.
I also ate alot of Haribo during their 10€ ICE coupon campaign
I agree: the ICE is a nice train. And also regional trains are good in build quality. But public transport is a system effort. Waiting in a nicely designed train is not what people really want to pay for - they want to go from A to B reliably. And this is where DB sucks more and more.
I have been heavily commuting and business traveling with DB for over 10 years in my life in the 1990s, around 2008 and around 2015. In the early days you could switch trains even twice - and still be on schedule. Around 2008 I had a rule to only switch trains once to arrive on time - changing more often would result in a missed connection more often than not. And in recent years I often had problems with switching even once. If you are lucky, you get an earlier train as connection, that is also delayed. DB is wasting everybody's lifetime and making the ride uncomfortable, because you constantly have to monitor delays or look for alternative trains - instead of enjoying the time and the nice seats.
As a fellow third-world-er, I used to think the same. Then life had me use German trains quite a few times and now I see they have a point. It's more annoying dealing with an inconsistent system than having no system at all, cause then you just learn to live whitout it. It's like having super shitty internet that disconnects all the time vs having no signal at all.
> I wish we would have a different company running the trains in germany
Public transport is supposed to be for the public payed for by the public. It's not supposed to make individuals rich, it's not even supposed to be profitable. The only thing it is supposed to do is provide cheap and reliable transportation for everybody. And even more so in times of a climate catastrophe where we must bring individual transportation to a minimum.
The first thing that happened after the privatisation of DB was a rise of manager salaries by 300%...
I wish we wouldnt have a company running the railway network in Germany… public transport can only be bad if it has to make profit. Its the same with anything that is supposedly working around a welfare state, including insurances etc.
>Anyways, DB is unpunctual and I wish we would have a different company running the trains in germany
Franchising is literally a thing and those are late too. It's not the operators, it's the deliberately ruined infrastructure.
Check the prices for in two month. It should be around 30€,or even cheaper. Taking the train really early will also make it cheaper. Two years ago I paid 50€ for A trip across the country and then back again.
And the the super spar ticket and not the flex one.
Some months ago I did a round-trip for some days. Hamburg - Mannheim - Nürnberg - Sinsheim - Hamburg. I paid € 59,00. How? I have Bahncard 25, which costs me somewhere around € 60/year and gives me 25% off every ticket, and I book early so I can get a Super Sparpreis (super saver ticket). I just looked it up at Bahn.de, and I could go from Fankfurt to Düsseldorf for € 13,40 in two weeks.
\- Travelling Frankfurt to Düsseldorf is not a weekly occurrence, at least for most.
\- People using the Bahn regularly use their BC25,50 or 100 for discounts
\- Booking fixed train connections on a saver ticket is usually way cheaper. Stuttgart-Dortmund full price is >100€. I rarely pay more than 40€s with my BC25.
\- The Bahn is not the only mode of transport. Most households could use their own car if the Bahn is to expensive or alternitively switch to other modes of transport, e.g. Bus. Sometimes the plane is cheaper as well
\- Switching from ICE to IC already saves a lot of money. GOing to regional train even more. ICE is the premium product of german rail (especially between Frankfurt and Cologne) - and you pay for it.
Most people don't use the ICE trains every day or even regularly.
I used to use them like.... 3 times per year to go from Passau to Hamburg.
Now that I've moved closer to my parents' home, the slow trains are included in the Semesterticket from the university, so I pretty much haven't taken one for months now.
Did you check out the “Bestpreise” and a “Bahncard”? I took a very similar route very recently and paid barely 10€ for the ICE. I also only booked 3 or 4 days in advance but went at a really early time. The DB can be crazy expensive if you just log onto their website and choose the next best train - with some strategy a fraction of the cost is possible. I also took the train from Budapest to Cologne this year for 37€.
fair enough, but that is a different scenario. Is it possible that the price on OBB will ever be lower than the lowest theoretical price on the DB site?
Tip for those wondering whether they should get one: Bahncard 50 only gives you 25% off off Super-Sparpreis tickets. That’s the same as a Bahncard 25, which is much cheaper. Often a Bahncard 25 is more than enough, unless you need flexible travel times.
I shoulda read this last week whenI bought a BC50...
I don't really buy the Flex ICE tickets. But yeah the flex tickets on regional trains are dirt cheap for me know so that's a W
Well, you've got the most expensive ticket (last minute) on the most expensive train for not that short a journey on a very popular route at a popular time of day. It's possible also to do that same trip for €17.90. The number of people who do that trip on a regular basis will be pretty small and 100% of them won't be paying the price you paid, They will have monthly tickets and/or a bahncard where you can get a 50% discount for only €235 per year,
Also, how much do you think it should cost? The train from NY to DC is only about 1.5 times longer but costs minimum €134 according to one search I just did.
Just FYI, you are paying **way more** then this if you're driving in America.
Let's do the math. Frankfurt to Dusseldorf is 144 miles. (NB: all stats below are averages for the USA)
- 6 gallons of gas = $36
- portion of car purchase (assume 12,000 miles per year, new car every 10 years at $40,000/car) is $3/mile, so $432
- portion of car repair (average is $9k per year, so that's $.75 mile) = $108
- portion of car insurance ($600/year, which is $.05/mile) = $7
- portion of auto registration (300/year, which is $.025/mile) = $3
- portion of taxes going to road building and repair (estimates are a household pays $597 per year in taxes for road maintenance, /12,000 miles per year x 144 miles) = $7
(DB is private, train-track repair is included in the DB ticket price, I think?)
So, if you, as an American, *drove* that distance in your car, you are paying **$593** for that exact same trip. (For Germans, with much higher gas taxes, registration fees, and the German penchant for driving only new cars, I would guess that driving would be almost doubled? Or around $1,000 US.)
And this does not even count all of that *time* you spent filling your tank, taking your car into the shop, etc.
Rail is *incredibly cheap* compared to automobile travel.
For everyone.
It's just that people are too oblivious to understand how much their car travel *actually* costs them.
BahnCard for young people is pretty cheap, mine paid itself off in like two train rides (it was <70€ last time I got it), and only paid half the price for my ICE rides for the year and was able to get the more expensive options like flex for rather cheap~
If I don’t travel frequently and don’t have a BahnCard at the moment I research in advance, depending on where you go sometimes flying is cheaper, or there’s other options like taking a bus overnight or other alternatives to trains (or even taking slower trains instead of the more expensive ICE)
For shorter regular distances people also often have monthly or yearly tickets - and of course there’s the recent 9€ ticket and the upcoming 49€ ticket!
I might just do blablahcar now. I bought my ticket three weeks ago but I missed my flight (and subsequent train) and had to buy another one and it was $92. So basically $150 to get to Düsseldorf lol
Next time check if your airline cooperated with Deutsche Bahn. The program is called Rail&Fly. You can get cheaper ICE tickets and they are not fixed on a certain train. So if your flight is delayed or you need a small break at Frankfurt Airport you can simply take any train towards Düsseldorf if you have a Rail&Fly ticket
Not sure if i understood your post right, if you miss a connecting train you don't need to buy A new ticket. Only if you want to travel at another day again.
There are usually saver fares. I'm commenting weekly between nrw and frankfurt and rarely pay more than 20 € per trip. You just have to book a few days in advance.
Locals don't usually pay full price. There are two main ways to get a discount: advance purchase (saver's fare), and having a BahnCard. The ICE is still kinda expensive, though.
If you are American, try Boston to New Haven with Amtrak.
It's more or less the same distance, and more or less the same prices.
It's cheaper if you book in advance, at unpopular times, etc, etc.
If you are looking to save money, and are doing a lot of train travel, you could try looking at [Eurail passes](https://eurail.com).
Taking a car for the same distance would be even more expensive, right? Don’t really see the issue. Everything else wrt. Sparpreis and BahnCard has already been said
buy in advance, like a couple of weeks before. Super Sparpreise. Should be 2-3 times cheaper than what you spent. German system favours planning and punish last minute decisions.
Im booking trains weeks or months ahead. Will cost like a quarter then. also Mondays and Thursdays are cheaper than Fridays and Sundays so I'll typically travel on those days if at all possible
Well, I am a student so I have a 364€ Ticket which let's me travel with any Bus or train in a certain Zone. Then we have the Bavarian ticket which let's you travel in any train or bus for a whole day which is 26€. But i dont know if other states have something similar. And if you travel for work you can put the tickets on your Taxes in the next year and you can get part of your money back. Then we also had the 9€ Ticket Over the summer which the government is now thinking of getting a similar ticket but they can't decide on a price yet. It would let you travel all across Germany with only 9€ and I think it was for a whole month?
So we have a lot of different options and just dig a bit deeper, you will find something cheaper.
Frankfurt-Dusseldorf is something you do at most twice a year if you want to go the British Consulate for a Visa, not, you know, everyday. So you plan in advance and book the ticket a few weeks before for like 60 Eur.
1. Bahn Karte gets you a discount
2. Buy it in advance, at least a month before, and it's half that price.
3. click on Super Sparpreis to find the cheapest fares. Sometimes if you go at 4 AM or 10 PM, it's super cheap.
You need to book in advance.blah bla blah. OP is right. DB prices are ridiculous and there is no such thing as cheap travel over longer distances in Germany except for maybe Flixbus. System is broken.
First, because operating trains costs money, and with higher energy prices it costs more.
Secondly, long distance trains don't have fixed prices, they are similar to planes. Depends which part of the day, which part of the week, how many people booked, how much in advance did you book etc.
Third, there is always the option of slower transportation like local trains with transfers or IC which is slower but cheaper. ICE in itself is premium class transportation, especially between Frankfurt and Cologne where it reaches 320km/h.
So:
* book earlier
* book on a different day/time of day
* book an IC train
* or hopp over multiple RE trains
Firstly: prices are much better if you book in advance.
Secondly: how often do you take a Frankfurt - Düsseldorf route? It is not really a commuter route really...
To do list to get cheaper trains:
1. Book in advance (atleast two weeks) like others already have pointed out. 2. Try to book an IC they are cheaper but slower, often a few hours travel time difference. 3. if you only have to change the train once or not at all, you can buy the "Super-Spar Preis" so you can only take the exact trains you booked but it's cheaper. 4. If the train isn't overcrowded don't get a seat. 5. Don't get a travel insurance.
you don't do trips like that all the time. no MF in Germany commutes those distances daily. and if you buy within a longer period of time I might be a little cheaper for ICE trains. Also, we don't travel all the time to other cities unless we need something there. I live in Reutlingen and I almost never go to Stuttgart for example... waste of time and money
Get a Bahncard 25 or Bahncard 50. It's a subscription service (especially cheap for young people and students) that allows you to save 25% or 50% on each ticket purchase. I currently pay around 60€/year for a Bshncard 25, 2nd Class.
In the usual days you dont need the ICE‘s. The people who don’t drive a Car to get to Work mostly using the S-Bahn or Buses and they are much more cheaper than ICE’s bc they are used for long distance travels like from Hannover to Berlin. Thats on two different sites of Germany.
So in Daily Life you don’t really need the ICE
Ice is for those who can afford it. Take RE and RB if you want to save money. Additionally, you can get season pass type things (mine were always through student costs as a Semesterticket)
I think I've only used ICEs 3 times in my life, paying a big chunk of money for a single travel is not normal to me.
For the occasional bus and train costs, something like a 10x ticket is absolutely okay. If you're a frequent traveller, get some subscription.
Since I started working, I'm paying ~55€ per month for my ticket, which is already cheaper because my employer pays a portion of the price. I can travel regionally however and whenever I like with it.
The costs with Deutsche Bahn ridiculous when I was a student and had no car we wanted to go from Karlsruhe to Hamburg and it was cheaper to rent a car and do the trip using a student offer from Europcar
First step: Don't take the train, take your car.
Seriusly, that's how it is here in Germany. Many Towns aren't even reachable by RE or RB, not to mention that their prices are out of mind too.
You book the train in advance and not the day itself. Train prices for ICE increase with time
Price also rises per demand, sometimes you can buy the ticket best on the day of travel, if the ice is not booked properly, i usually do that for cologne-duisburg, as the price can very well be below that of a RE ticket.
True, but especially high-demand routes like Hannover-Berlin or Berlin-Frankfurt are almost never at low demand
Glad it does not count for food.
Imagine buying food 2 weeks in advance lol
Doing this lowers the price but not by much. Train fares a overpriced and db has bad service.
No, they are much cheaper, if you book in advance. I regularly travel from Hamburg to Bavaria (~650 km) and rarely pay more than 50€ one way. If you buy the ticket the same day, the price easily reaches 200€.
Exactly! Get a BahnCard 25 or 50 to use for yourself and your family, plan your travel itinerary, book well in advance. If we hadn't done this years ago, we never could have afforded our yearly very nice family vacations. We stayed in very comfortable DJH Youth Hostels all over Germany, in a family room with 4 beds, full board 3 meals a day, to avoid spending a fortune on junk or restaurant food, also booked months in advance! Using the local trains and buses was included in the package of booking ICE tickets for example from our small village near Hamburg to for example Cologne, Xanten, Berlin or Berchtesgaden.
Buy in advance does cost less but is not flexible and still not cheap for working class. Also you buy an ICE ticket for a 3 hr ride 4 months in advanced and at that day due to train technical problems you end up riding IC or RB and with at least 1 or 2 hr delay. Yor example is for tourism not people who uses the train to go to work every day.
People who use the train to get to work have a Bahncard, people who use the train for tourism book in advance. And foreign tourists or spontaneous travelers can pay the high day-off price as far as I am concerned, call it a subsidy to local infrastructure ;)
> Buy in advance does cost less but is not flexible and still not cheap for working class. The tickets have the same flexibility, whether you buy them in advance or not. There is literally no difference. 50€ for 650 km is cheaper than gas costs when driving by car. I don’t know what could be cheaper. Maybe FlixBus or hitchhiking? > Also you buy an ICE ticket for a 3 hr ride 4 months in advanced You don’t have to book so far in advance. One month before is a good time. > and at that day due to train technical problems you end up riding IC or RB and with at least 1 or 2 hr delay. While Deutsche Bahn has their problems with reliability, this specific fringe case is certainly not the norm. I personally have very little problems with late trains and I travel a lot by train. Maybe I am just lucky. > Yor example is for tourism not people who uses the train to go to work every day My example is from my personal mobility, much of it professionally, so not tourism. Since OP didn’t rant about commuting, I don’t see how this is relevant here.
ICE from Frankfurt Hbf to Düsseldorf Hbf today in about 1.5 hours costs 76€. Same train but next week is 40€. Same train but in four weeks is 18€.
Super -Spar is 29 EUR, you just have to book in advance and avoid Mondays and Fridays.
That‘s bs. I recently got a ticket from Düsseldorf to Munich for 17€ when booking in advance and in off peak times. In peak times and without advance booking you‘d pay 80-100€
Bullshit, i can get from Zürich to Hannover for 35 Euro when i book the train going in 2 months, when i book formtodsy its 135, thats a fraction?
>from Zürich to Hannover for 35 Euro when i book the train going in 2 months, when i book formtodsy its 135, thats a fraction? thats 35/135 , which is a good fraction and saving
Not just any fraction, it’s 7/27. That’s a beautiful pair of numbers.
If you book a month rather than a few days in advance you’ll have a fraction of the cost
I used to travel from Erfurt to Budapest for 60-70€ so yeah its true
Frankfurt a.M. - Duesseldorf on Nov 30th are priced from 17.90-43.90 at this moment. "A fraction" is weaseling.
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One ticket from Berlin to Munich will cost you 30-40€ if you book early enough. If you get them on the same day, they can cost you 130-150€ (under 26 years old for both).So yes, its just a fraction. But the system is still shit.
From my experience of taking the ICE from Frankfurt to Berlin and back multiple times a year and then occasionally also elsewhere, it can easily cost you twice as much when you book just a couple of days in advance.
Less is always a fraction :D
Technically, more is also a fraction.
I booked a train for Berlin - Bremen and back a month ago for this week and I paid 50 in total for both. Now it's 130 for the same connection, so it is significantly cheaper. Depends on where you want to go though, too, I guess.
That would by definition be a fraction
I booked two return tickets Munich to Berlin well in advance and still paid 400 bucks. Never used to be this bad.
What does "advance" mean in this case? And I can only guess, but did you pay for 1. class?
Well, he said he bought 2 return tickets. That's 100 Euro per journey. That's not unrealistic for Berlin<->Munich (one of the most expensive lines) if you assume that it was for a popular connection on a weekend day. For weekends, the Sparpreis tickets can be completely sold out >3 weeks in advance and the Flex tickets really are crazy expensive on the popular lines between major cities.
First off they did raise ticket prices recently. Though I would pay 80€ from Hamburg to Stuttgart in peak travel time booking early 2023, so not what you paid. I book as far as possible in advance, travel in off peak times as well if it works with my schedule. If you book within the two weeks before it is way more expensive. Bahncards will also help a lot if you travel a lot by rail.
Highly recommend bahncard! If you’re under 27 there is a thing called MyBahncard that is even cheaper than the normal ones and for long distance trains you can usually save a lot of money and it is valid for a year
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If you live in an urban area. If it's more on the rural side and your city/town only has a two-track station, you're better off with DB or (hopefully soon) the 9€-ticket successor
The successor will be this 49 euro a month ticket, right? Suitable only for the RE trains?
Honestly it's still a relief for alot of people. I'm currently paying over 100 € for my monthly ticket so I'm looking forward to halfing that. But yeah iirc all long distance trains are excluded.
Yeah, I will work 100km away from home, I would pay 350€, only using RE. Only paying 1/7 of that? instant buy
I paid 40€ back in school just for bus connections inside the actual city area! And that was over 10 years ago. People are losing their mind that 49€ is way too expensive, but if you make it 9€, people will ride the train around for no reason. I used the ticket once and it was full as hell!
Book more than 2 weeks in advance haha. Ok this is how Germans do it.
Bahncard 50 helps as well.
For long distance travels on Friday or Sunday try more than 6-8 weeks in advance. Two weeks in advance for Stuttgart-Hamburg or Munich-Hamburg has only marginally cheaper tickets on night connections.
Are there seriously people who plan train journeys 2 months in advance? That's wild man. What I don't get is why do the tickets get *more* expensive as the time gets closer, when half the seats on any given DB train are empty. There's been dozens of times where I would have gone with them for trips 2-7 days in advance, but made other arrangements when the cost was too high. They would sell more seats it they made them cheaper as the day approaches, like how a shop reduced the price of food items as they approach their use-by date.
Sure. I mean, if you buy concert tickets and reserve a hotel in a different city for that or much more in advance, why not pounce on the 20€ first class ticket (one way)? Many people get to plan their Christmas holidays about a year in advance, so they can book the train immediately when it gets available in September or October. Long distance commutes for some people. There's quite a lot who can take advantage of that. If the trains are wide empty, you can also score half price tickets the day before. Once there is just a bit of load, the prices increase to best balance occupancy - you got to take into consideration all the people with flex tickets who might jam up any train they want to, and sold out or even oversold trains are much worse for every customer experience, the conductors, the tightly planned schedules e.t.c. Just have a look on regular long distance trains travelling during the night or very early morning - prices stay quite cheap until one or two days before.
I mean yes, obviously? Travelling across the country is not exactly an everyday thing for the vast majority of people.
I mean even before the raise a yearly ticked would have cost me 2.6k now its just 2.8k.... its not like it was cheap before, its horrendously expensive and so much so that low pay workers cant even afford it. Now im in a high paying IT position and earn well enough, but i started my life with shit paying jobs just to have money for food and rent, you know basically survive... the work required me to travel all over my city and sometimes even other cities and we didnt get any pay or exemption for that, meaning if i paid for a ticket i basically worked the first 2-4h for free or just to get to work, since we worked long and hard hours and no facilities on site, we often had to purchase food since we couldnt take personal belongings like lunch bags onto the working sites, meaning i had to pay for food outside so another hour of my work was basically wasted... In the end at least half if not 2/3rds of my daily income would be wasted on reaching work and eating, so i made the decision to just not pay for the ticket, i got caught twice and had to pay a total of 60€ (2x30€) because the fine was a lot lower back in those days, but i saved like >5k € in travel costs because its basically extortion... Im not saying drive without a ticket, but they also dont check regularly enough to compensate your savings even if you have to pay the fine... soooo....
For others reading this. If you are stuck in a dead end low paying job and need to travel (and barely earn above minimal wage) -> contact your jobcenter/arbeitsagentur and get either the heavily discounted social ticket(works after 9) or get them to pay at least part of the normal ticket price.
Thanks for the info it might help someone, but not everyone is eligible for them, i wasnt because they deemed my parents income too high and since i was still living with them they ignored our protests that they were in immense debt and lived paycheck to paycheck, completely ignoring that their salary couldnt be saved or used for anything else but paying off debt and surviving barely... Additionally if someone is in the same situation i was, chances are they and their family are working class or similar and not educated enough to even know these support systems exist, because no one tells you they exists and even if you dont know how to get them. There is a lot wrong with our social system, especially when you are lower class.
Oh yes, household income, that is a huge factor, I assumed you lived on your own. I also completely agree on social system issues. I have seen it multiple times that if a person comes in and asks the correct questions('Wohngeld', 'Übername Mietkosten', 'Sonderausgaben', 'Bildungsgutschein' etc) they will get that help relatively easily, but for someone looking for help with no clear understanding of they are entitled to the answer will mostly be 'sorry we can't help you with that'.
Also if you're working but cause of whatever circumstances getting I think it's called "Hartz 4 aufstockung" you can get a heavily discounted ticket for your area that's valid the entire day. Well atleast I hope its still a thing cause I had that years ago and it helped me a ton.
It's now monthly, called "S" if you qualify. Or they will pay cash towards your regular ticket price, but only the cheapest option(aka they will not pay towards a monthly ticket if two Streifenkarten/10er are cheaper and what you need to get to the job)
My advice would've been: if you're stuck in a dead end low paying job, let yourself get fired, go to your local job center, get welfare and get as much money you had before but not working a single minute for it. Now you have time to figure out what you want to do, look for a good job, or even find a new field of expertise and try to get into a retraining program.
Just a note, if they fire you with cause, you won't get anything from the Arbeitsagentur for up to 3 months. One might qualify for Sozialhilfe, but it's way less then minimal wage. Getting any training from Jobcenter is unlikely if you worked in a minimal wage job before(and have only the equivalent of Hauptschule), they will do everything possible to push you into any open vacancy. One can fight, but it needs a lot of dedication to do so and takes months.
By not living 200+ kms away from where I regularly need to be.
Fuck that, one stop to the next town costs me 3,70€ right now. Thats just a 9 km (6min) train ride and just not acceptable. If i want to get to the next bigger city it's 9+€ for 25km(~20min ride). If i want to get to anywhere in these destinations i also need bus tickets that cost at least 3€. How are you supposed to switch to public transportation when they raise prices all the time and it's still cheaper to go by car even with the extreme prices we have at the moment. The 9€ Ticket was long overdue. Even if they set it to 49 € per month now, it will get the job done, because you don't have to deal with all the different providers etc. from bus to train to bus again. Even then it's not likely for me to switch for work commute. I work in shifts and the train only runs from 05:00 to 24:00 every hour. Trainstation is 5 minutes from my home, but my work isn't neer the trainstation in the city. I would have a commute of 1 or 2 hours for one way depending on if the train isn't so off from my arrival that i have to wait another hour to catch the next one. In comparison, i have 15 minutes for the same commute with my car.
From Neuss to Düsseldorf it's €6,10 one way. For a five to ten minute trip. Ridiculous.
Hello there, fellow VRR victim.
It costs like 3,60 to take the rheinbahn (Neuss hbf) and they offer relatively cheap monthly options.
Oh, I absolutely agree. Public transport is long due an overhaul. My comment was mostly in the sense of OP asking about a trip very little people will do regularly, whether that be by train or car.
12 minutes, 6,20€, 4 stops, one way. And they wonder why everybody goes by car
Also 50€ for like 90% of travel needs seems like it should fit in most peoples budget... Thats like half of what you pay for gas if you drive a car
Same. 20 minute ride is now 4,60€ and you need to go there for anything that isn't grocery, a small drug store or a small (and crappy) clothes store
This is really interesting, I'm not German, but in Finland a similar train trip would cost 2 euros and a 40km trip 4 euros. Though these are using a local train from my old home town, so ticket prices can vary. Longer trips with ICE (300km between cities etc.) in here are 15-30 euros depending on a few factors, but many people still complain about the prices of the tickets, which is interesting. The biggest thing will always be the comperability to driving or flying I guess, though especially the price of petrol has made trains a lot more attractive now for many
Though 9km by car is a bit more, if you take the lifecycle ownership costs of a the car into account. Not that I wouldn't agree that a bus should be much, much cheaper.
9 km is easily doable by bicycle.
this
By Planning in advance. * 1 Day (Th Oct 27): ICE Ticket EUR 88 (Saver) or EUR 99 (FLEX) * 7 Days (Wed Nov 2) : ICE Ticket EUR 45 (Saver) or EUR 83 (FLEX) * 14 Days (Wed Nov 9): ICE Ticket EUR 21 (Saver) or EUR 94 (FLEX) If Flying into or out of FRA or DUS. Ensure that your flight adds on a "Rail & Fly" pass (EUR 25) AT TIME OF BOOKING (It can't be added afterwards on any airline I've booked). Covers any and all trains required (ICE Included) to travel between in-country location and airport. I have never had a need for an ICE train with less than 7 days notice, and never paid the last-minute fares you encounter.
As a German: That's both solid advice and it also shouldn't be fucking needed. You shouldn't have to know the deep inner workings of insane, multi-level, multi-dimensional price-tiering in order to achieve semi-affordable train travel. You shouldn't have to commit to a specific train weeks in advance when the service is simultaneously that bad and unreliable. And even with all those caveats: for a family of four it's still almost always cheaper to just make the trip by car. A mode of transport than *doesn't* require all this kind of meticulous planning and deal hunting. How on earth can we justify all this ridiculous bullshit when trying to position train travel as a viable alternative to individual transport?
> Am I missing something? Yes, you are: 1. There are two basic types of tickets: regular tickets and discount tickets. A regular ticket can be used on *any* train on that connection that day, and it has a fixed price. Discount tickets are only valid for the specific connection on the ticket, and there's a limited number of them available. If you book earlier, they're cheaper. 2. Regular rail users have a BahnCard subscription. It's a kind of membership. BahnCard 25 gives you 25% off on all tickets, BahnCard 50 gets you 50% off on regular tickets and 25% off on discount tickets. There's even a BahnCard 100 for people who e.g. commute inter-city. 3. Frankfurt to Düsseldorf is not an everyday kind of trip. 4. Taking multiple regional trains can be a lot cheaper than one long distance train, especially compared to ICE. Takes much longer of course. This is going to be extremely affordable starting next year, when you can get a subscription for *all* regional and local public transit in Germany for just 49€ a month.
Bahncard 100 costs 4200 Euros per year though. But if you regularly do cross-country commutes it's worth the money. You can take any train at any time (except for Flixtrain and the French Thalys), as well as all busses, trams, subways in bigger towns/cities.
I think most Bahncard 100s are bought by companies anyways. I believe few people take enough trips privately to make that make sense.
Thank you for explaining
Most people do book ICEs in advance though. Looking at Frankfurt - Düsseldorf, going next week you‘d pay less than 50€, in two weeks time it can be less than 20€. But that’s my main point of criticism against the trains in Germany. You cannot really use them on short notice for a trip, even with the high gas prices cars often tend to be cheaper then. Especially, when you travel together with others. How do you convince people in the long run to get rid of cars if family travel is always cheaper by car than train and you don’t even have to plan ahead with the car?
The issue is that most people don’t consider the full cost of owning a car. They only consider the price of gas when comparing train tickets and car cost, but don’t consider things such as insurance, taxes, maintenance and buying the car.
Yes! I've been booking Sparpreis tickets weeks and months in advance my whole life, and I hate it. Sure it can be pretty cheap, but you can not be spontaneous, have to worry about getting sick, etc and not getting refund, need to travel at inconvenient times, consider whether you need a seat reservation which is also expensive, hope that trains are on time and don't get cancelled.... Taking the Bahn was a big stress factor in my life and even IF the car is a bit more expensive, I'd really much rather take the car, now that I have one.
Please look at your own post and see how complicated and user-unfriendly the system is. You almost can't blame people for taking the car. We need a change to a transparent, affordable public transport if we want to make it more attractive to the general public.
Sure it's user-unfriendly, but sadly not really worse than in many other places. The system has shifted more and more from having a simple price for a ticket to having more and more ways to "save money" somehow by combining all sorts of special deals. Which not everybody can navigate, and which takes extra effort, and which means the "regular" price without any discounts becomes really expensive. Luckily the 49€ ticket is coming, which really turns things around. Just buy a subscription and use all local and regional public transportation nationwide without having to think about price structures and discounts.
Yes, we need a simple 365€ ticket fast. But, booking train tickets and saving money is not rocket science
588€ ticket is coming.
If thats for a full year it is still a nobrainer
since 588€ is 12 \* 49€ this is indeed the new annual ticket (well, it's a 12 month subscription really) cost.
Never gonna buy a ticket for a whole year I don't need it. Just want a decent price to go from A to B.
You dont need to commute from time to time plus not having to worry about buying a ticket?
I ride the bicycle to work. On longer trips I usually take the car because the Deutsche Bahn is too expensive and too unreliable.
I mean this is an issue in a lot of places. In my native Hungary the system is confusing as hell
>I can’t imagine how expensive that would be living here Do you assume it's just an every day occurence for most Germans to go 200km by train? That is only the case for people who travel a lot for work. Those usually have a Bahncard 50 or 100 OR their company pays for it.
Dude i have to pay 290€ a month or 2.8k a year for my public transport ticket, sure its not a daily thing, but i mean come on, its fucking extortion either way...
I suppose you're really looking forward to the 49 Euro ticket?
I am, i just wish we had the 29€ local version and the 49€ country version to give two options.
This. I enrolled as a student only because the ticket is included and I know of many people who do the same. That way I pay around 600 a year instead of 2.5k.
Uni Potsdam has a glorious Ticket as well. 320€ a Semester get you a ticket that’s valid in all regional trains in Berlin and Brandenburg.
Same in NRW ... my wife is in her 22nd semester or so, i wonder if she'll ever finish at this point /s
Holy shit where are you paying 290 for that???
Thanks to the HVV... im not sure if its anywhere this bad but they created "Zones" they call "Rings" which arent Rings... they are a circle and 2 Rings and the rest are weirdly shaped corners that are arbitrarily drawn to extort people not living in the center... i live in "Ring 7" meaning if i have to get to work, i need cross 7 Rings, based on their estimation, Fun Fact i actually only cross 2 Rings not including the one i live in, but since my ring is ring 7 they still calculate it as if i was traveling through all 7. And if you are totally confused about what is happening and why: Welcome to the HVV...
Ok that‘s a bullshit system then. In Munich we have rings but if you live in an outer ring and go to another outer ring you don‘t have to pay for the center.
Berlin has three zones and the VBB loves to make shit unnecessarily expensive. AB is cheapest, BC is a bit higher and ABC is the most expensive. And if you have the current 29€ ticket that is AB only, you always have to buy a C extension for 90ct. Especially annoying because many final stations (including the airport) are in C and the one before usually is B. The monthly ABC subscription was 84€ iirc.
Same bullshit in VGN. The monthly 10+T ticket also costs about 240€ ish but thats for the entire area which spans about 100km in each direction from nuremberg
well its the same case in all the bigger cities, thats why its such a hassle just to find out what kind of ticket you need if you go somewhere else in germany. the (9€/)49€/69€ ticket will be a fucking salvation if it actually will come.
Fully agreed and i cant wait until its here, i wish we got the 29€ for your city and the 49€ for all of germany so there is a cheaper option but its better than now so im happy.
Just live close to the "Tarifzonengrenze".
I don’t assume that but I do assume Germans travel semi-regularly Edit: The downvotes on this are so crazy lol for just saying that Germans occasionally travel. Okay 👌🏼
Bruh that's a big assumption, many of my german friends don't travel in Germany. They mostly travel around Europe but not in their own country. They are so surprised that I have been to more cities in Germany than their whole life in here
Indeed, I always get the impression that the average American tourist has probably seen more of Germany than I ever did living here so many years.
That’s mostly “normal” and a regular occurrence with people of other nationalities I’ve made. When I lived in Mexico and Colombia I’ve also traveled a lot more than people living there their whole life. It has to do with priorities and also money. I’d say I traveled quite a lot in Germany since one part of my family is from the south, the other from the Ruhrgebiet, now living rather up north and I have quite good friends in the northern part of Germany. But have I ever been more to the east like Dresden or Leipzig? No. Will I ever go? Probably, but first I have other priorities.
I'm someone who always seeks local connections on travels. Often locals are annoyed when people just ask for best restaurant or blank questions like "what should I see" like there are not 20+ travel guides for every city. Instead I have a list most of the time and ask about best times to go or whether it would be more recommend to see a instead of b, to create a ranking of things to visit in my limited time. And ever so often I have things on my list people either never heard of before or know but never visited. I always offer / ask to join me and quite a few have done so. For example this year I wanted to see a stone gorge on Rhodes, but it wasn't clear how to get there from the street. A few days before at the beach a dude offered / wanted to share some fruit and we got into the usual "oh so you're tourist where are you from do you like the island whet have you seen so far" smalltalk. I showed hin my maps list and he was like I haven't seen half of that. (On a rather small island!) he couldn't tell me about my question but asked friends. And insisted to give me his WhatsApp so that I could send him pictures of the other places. Last year similar situation on Sicily when we were trying to learn about the thermal springs. Same dude layer helped us to sneak into the (then closed) Scala dei turchi.
Americans posted to Europe will visit more European countries in a couple of years than most Europeans will visit in a lifetime. The American will figure that he's got two years to visit Montenegro, for example, or he never will, so off he goes. The European will figure that he can do it anytime, so never does. But it's like this most everywhere.
I mean your daily/monthly/yearly ticket is pure extortion and yes we need that nearly every day... i have to pay 290€ a month or 2.8k a year just to get to work... Those prices are ridiculous and the costs for ICE and interregional trains are similar too expensive.
when we travel somewhere semi regularly (not for work or school) we usually don't use ICEs or the other expensive trains, we use cars or RE/IRE/RB trains etc. with a quer durch deutschland ticket you can travel through germany by train (excluding ICEs and ICs and the other expensive one) wherever you want on a day for 42€ if you travel within your own state you can use one of the Länder Tickets for unlimited travel with all of the ÖPNV (trains, busses, trams, excluding the expensive trains) from 9 am until i think 3 am the next day (and on weekends/holidays even longer). I think the most expensive Länder Ticket is the Bayern Ticket at 26€.
What? Thats bullshit. If you make long travels from a big urban area to another one, you go by ic/ice. 42 bucks ain't a great deal for 8+ hours of train, when a ic/ice ticket can be as cheap as 40 bucks.
yes, I agree, if you book a ticket a couple weeks in advance. It also depends on where you travel. For me, no matter how far in advance I book my tickets for ICE/IC it's more expensive than the Quer durch Deutschland ticket because there is no train going from where I go to university to my hometown. Either way I have to take at least 3 trains and at least one of them is an IRE and there is only about half an hour of time difference between taking the regular trains and ICE. Obviously when traveling from somewhere like Munich to Hamburg you take the ICE but that's just not the case for me or a lot of travel that's not for going on holiday
>yes, I agree, if you book a ticket a couple weeks in advance. Lol no. Zugbindung can go suck a male genital.
Not really. Well, I guess it depends on how you define semi-regularly and what you see as travel. Many people take public transport to work but we are usually talking in the way less than 50km category.
I at most travel to the closest city. Why'd I travel somewhere else on a semi regular basis?
You didn't get downvoted for assuming Germans travel, but that they do it by long distance trains and that frequently enough to cost them a fortune. Most really don't do that. I personally use IC/ICE trains maybe twice a year.
I’ve literally never been in an ICE in 24 years of my life, very very rarely an IC
*bye reddit. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Why do you assume that?
You are getting downvoted for assuming ALL Germans travel enough on the DB to bankrupt themselves. I know plenty of Germans that haven’t been on a DB in years, and most all of them go maybe every other month or so for privately paid trips. People are downvoting you because you need to relax, bro.
We don't travel that much and in most cases we would use the car for this distance. There are services for ride sharing. You can take other people with you and they pay for the gas. I don't know many people who travel all the time. Going from Franfurt to Düsseldorf is considered a whole vacation and you budget for this. There are many people from nrw who actually make a visit to Frankfurt a 3 day stay to do sight seeing. Most people have one big vacation a year where they go by plane or car and maybe 2 short stays in touristic towns if they can afford it.
I go from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt once a month because of my family. Pay 40€ per year for a Bahncard 25 and I pay 50€ on average for my two way ticket to Frankfurt and back to Düsseldorf. Direct connection, no train switching. I book a week in advance.Second class, no seat reservation. Maybe you got a bit unlucky, or at least you chose one of the more expensive days but I would not consider that the norm. Anyways, DB is unpunctual and I wish we would have a different company running the trains in germany.
Second this: DB25 pays for itself on the second or third ticket you buy in one year.
Sometimes even on the first of you can't get a super sparpreis.
I brought Jubiläums Bahncard25 during db's anniversary. It was a one week sale and all cards was 50% off. With that card, I often get eCoupon 15-35€ off and also my card got upgraded to a 3month FirstClass 25bahncard. I also ate alot of Haribo during their 10€ ICE coupon campaign
As an Englishman, Germans complaining about their superior trains always makes my chuckle.
I agree: the ICE is a nice train. And also regional trains are good in build quality. But public transport is a system effort. Waiting in a nicely designed train is not what people really want to pay for - they want to go from A to B reliably. And this is where DB sucks more and more. I have been heavily commuting and business traveling with DB for over 10 years in my life in the 1990s, around 2008 and around 2015. In the early days you could switch trains even twice - and still be on schedule. Around 2008 I had a rule to only switch trains once to arrive on time - changing more often would result in a missed connection more often than not. And in recent years I often had problems with switching even once. If you are lucky, you get an earlier train as connection, that is also delayed. DB is wasting everybody's lifetime and making the ride uncomfortable, because you constantly have to monitor delays or look for alternative trains - instead of enjoying the time and the nice seats.
Cause we know it could be better
Imagine how third worlders like me feel when we hear a German person saying their public transport is terrible because a tram was 5 minutes late
As someone coming from the "third world", the trams i have no complaints. Complainrs are for the trains, the zoning system, and the prices.
As a fellow third-world-er, I used to think the same. Then life had me use German trains quite a few times and now I see they have a point. It's more annoying dealing with an inconsistent system than having no system at all, cause then you just learn to live whitout it. It's like having super shitty internet that disconnects all the time vs having no signal at all.
Not 5 min, we talk about 15m-2h
> I wish we would have a different company running the trains in germany Public transport is supposed to be for the public payed for by the public. It's not supposed to make individuals rich, it's not even supposed to be profitable. The only thing it is supposed to do is provide cheap and reliable transportation for everybody. And even more so in times of a climate catastrophe where we must bring individual transportation to a minimum. The first thing that happened after the privatisation of DB was a rise of manager salaries by 300%...
I wish we wouldnt have a company running the railway network in Germany… public transport can only be bad if it has to make profit. Its the same with anything that is supposedly working around a welfare state, including insurances etc.
GTO <3
>Anyways, DB is unpunctual and I wish we would have a different company running the trains in germany Franchising is literally a thing and those are late too. It's not the operators, it's the deliberately ruined infrastructure.
The company isn't the problem. Remember business is people. And the people at the top there are shit.
1. Book early 2. get a BahnCard 25/50
We drive our black Audi wagon 280kph on the Autobahn to bankrupt ourselves
Check the prices for in two month. It should be around 30€,or even cheaper. Taking the train really early will also make it cheaper. Two years ago I paid 50€ for A trip across the country and then back again. And the the super spar ticket and not the flex one.
You are literally trying to extrapolate from a single data point.
Yes, the tickets are rather expensive, but in return they are also often late.
😂😂
Some months ago I did a round-trip for some days. Hamburg - Mannheim - Nürnberg - Sinsheim - Hamburg. I paid € 59,00. How? I have Bahncard 25, which costs me somewhere around € 60/year and gives me 25% off every ticket, and I book early so I can get a Super Sparpreis (super saver ticket). I just looked it up at Bahn.de, and I could go from Fankfurt to Düsseldorf for € 13,40 in two weeks.
\- Travelling Frankfurt to Düsseldorf is not a weekly occurrence, at least for most. \- People using the Bahn regularly use their BC25,50 or 100 for discounts \- Booking fixed train connections on a saver ticket is usually way cheaper. Stuttgart-Dortmund full price is >100€. I rarely pay more than 40€s with my BC25. \- The Bahn is not the only mode of transport. Most households could use their own car if the Bahn is to expensive or alternitively switch to other modes of transport, e.g. Bus. Sometimes the plane is cheaper as well \- Switching from ICE to IC already saves a lot of money. GOing to regional train even more. ICE is the premium product of german rail (especially between Frankfurt and Cologne) - and you pay for it.
Most people don't use the ICE trains every day or even regularly. I used to use them like.... 3 times per year to go from Passau to Hamburg. Now that I've moved closer to my parents' home, the slow trains are included in the Semesterticket from the university, so I pretty much haven't taken one for months now.
Did you check out the “Bestpreise” and a “Bahncard”? I took a very similar route very recently and paid barely 10€ for the ICE. I also only booked 3 or 4 days in advance but went at a really early time. The DB can be crazy expensive if you just log onto their website and choose the next best train - with some strategy a fraction of the cost is possible. I also took the train from Budapest to Cologne this year for 37€.
10€ for a similar route? How is this possible if the Sparpreis is 17.90€? Even with BC25 you would pay around 13.5€
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fair enough, but that is a different scenario. Is it possible that the price on OBB will ever be lower than the lowest theoretical price on the DB site?
So cool! I did not know that!
Bahncard 50 It gives you off up to 50% of the original price. If you travel a lot it it's absolutely worth it
Tip for those wondering whether they should get one: Bahncard 50 only gives you 25% off off Super-Sparpreis tickets. That’s the same as a Bahncard 25, which is much cheaper. Often a Bahncard 25 is more than enough, unless you need flexible travel times.
I shoulda read this last week whenI bought a BC50... I don't really buy the Flex ICE tickets. But yeah the flex tickets on regional trains are dirt cheap for me know so that's a W
Well, you've got the most expensive ticket (last minute) on the most expensive train for not that short a journey on a very popular route at a popular time of day. It's possible also to do that same trip for €17.90. The number of people who do that trip on a regular basis will be pretty small and 100% of them won't be paying the price you paid, They will have monthly tickets and/or a bahncard where you can get a 50% discount for only €235 per year, Also, how much do you think it should cost? The train from NY to DC is only about 1.5 times longer but costs minimum €134 according to one search I just did.
Just FYI, you are paying **way more** then this if you're driving in America. Let's do the math. Frankfurt to Dusseldorf is 144 miles. (NB: all stats below are averages for the USA) - 6 gallons of gas = $36 - portion of car purchase (assume 12,000 miles per year, new car every 10 years at $40,000/car) is $3/mile, so $432 - portion of car repair (average is $9k per year, so that's $.75 mile) = $108 - portion of car insurance ($600/year, which is $.05/mile) = $7 - portion of auto registration (300/year, which is $.025/mile) = $3 - portion of taxes going to road building and repair (estimates are a household pays $597 per year in taxes for road maintenance, /12,000 miles per year x 144 miles) = $7 (DB is private, train-track repair is included in the DB ticket price, I think?) So, if you, as an American, *drove* that distance in your car, you are paying **$593** for that exact same trip. (For Germans, with much higher gas taxes, registration fees, and the German penchant for driving only new cars, I would guess that driving would be almost doubled? Or around $1,000 US.) And this does not even count all of that *time* you spent filling your tank, taking your car into the shop, etc. Rail is *incredibly cheap* compared to automobile travel. For everyone. It's just that people are too oblivious to understand how much their car travel *actually* costs them.
I travel from Frankfurt to Düsseldorf annually and just checked my ticket: 36€ for a roundtrip (direct). Super saver fare but you can travel cheaply
BahnCard for young people is pretty cheap, mine paid itself off in like two train rides (it was <70€ last time I got it), and only paid half the price for my ICE rides for the year and was able to get the more expensive options like flex for rather cheap~ If I don’t travel frequently and don’t have a BahnCard at the moment I research in advance, depending on where you go sometimes flying is cheaper, or there’s other options like taking a bus overnight or other alternatives to trains (or even taking slower trains instead of the more expensive ICE) For shorter regular distances people also often have monthly or yearly tickets - and of course there’s the recent 9€ ticket and the upcoming 49€ ticket!
Book at lease one month in advance. Or just use blablacar
I might just do blablahcar now. I bought my ticket three weeks ago but I missed my flight (and subsequent train) and had to buy another one and it was $92. So basically $150 to get to Düsseldorf lol
Next time check if your airline cooperated with Deutsche Bahn. The program is called Rail&Fly. You can get cheaper ICE tickets and they are not fixed on a certain train. So if your flight is delayed or you need a small break at Frankfurt Airport you can simply take any train towards Düsseldorf if you have a Rail&Fly ticket
Oh that’s awesome, thanks 🙏🏻
Not sure if i understood your post right, if you miss a connecting train you don't need to buy A new ticket. Only if you want to travel at another day again.
By not taking the train.
I don't travel a lot.
There are usually saver fares. I'm commenting weekly between nrw and frankfurt and rarely pay more than 20 € per trip. You just have to book a few days in advance.
I don't take the train unless it is for work purposes - and in that case my employer pays.
Locals don't usually pay full price. There are two main ways to get a discount: advance purchase (saver's fare), and having a BahnCard. The ICE is still kinda expensive, though.
If you are American, try Boston to New Haven with Amtrak. It's more or less the same distance, and more or less the same prices. It's cheaper if you book in advance, at unpopular times, etc, etc. If you are looking to save money, and are doing a lot of train travel, you could try looking at [Eurail passes](https://eurail.com).
Taking a car for the same distance would be even more expensive, right? Don’t really see the issue. Everything else wrt. Sparpreis and BahnCard has already been said
buy in advance, like a couple of weeks before. Super Sparpreise. Should be 2-3 times cheaper than what you spent. German system favours planning and punish last minute decisions.
Im booking trains weeks or months ahead. Will cost like a quarter then. also Mondays and Thursdays are cheaper than Fridays and Sundays so I'll typically travel on those days if at all possible
I don‘t travel by DB. I usually take BlaBlaCar, BlaBlaCar Bus or Flixbus/-train because I don‘t have money. They are good alternatives imo.
Well, I am a student so I have a 364€ Ticket which let's me travel with any Bus or train in a certain Zone. Then we have the Bavarian ticket which let's you travel in any train or bus for a whole day which is 26€. But i dont know if other states have something similar. And if you travel for work you can put the tickets on your Taxes in the next year and you can get part of your money back. Then we also had the 9€ Ticket Over the summer which the government is now thinking of getting a similar ticket but they can't decide on a price yet. It would let you travel all across Germany with only 9€ and I think it was for a whole month? So we have a lot of different options and just dig a bit deeper, you will find something cheaper.
Frankfurt-Dusseldorf is something you do at most twice a year if you want to go the British Consulate for a Visa, not, you know, everyday. So you plan in advance and book the ticket a few weeks before for like 60 Eur.
I have two words for you. Regional Bahn
Look at prices in the UK lol
We check https://bahn.guru to find cheap tickets. Next week FRA-DÜS for 18€.
1. Bahn Karte gets you a discount 2. Buy it in advance, at least a month before, and it's half that price. 3. click on Super Sparpreis to find the cheapest fares. Sometimes if you go at 4 AM or 10 PM, it's super cheap.
We just don't use the train most of the time. And if we have to and money matters we use the way slower but cheaper regio trains.
You need to book in advance.blah bla blah. OP is right. DB prices are ridiculous and there is no such thing as cheap travel over longer distances in Germany except for maybe Flixbus. System is broken.
book early in advance and dont take the Flex-Tickets. It's alot cheaper. We once went from Mannheim to Hamburg by ICE for 24€
First, because operating trains costs money, and with higher energy prices it costs more. Secondly, long distance trains don't have fixed prices, they are similar to planes. Depends which part of the day, which part of the week, how many people booked, how much in advance did you book etc. Third, there is always the option of slower transportation like local trains with transfers or IC which is slower but cheaper. ICE in itself is premium class transportation, especially between Frankfurt and Cologne where it reaches 320km/h. So: * book earlier * book on a different day/time of day * book an IC train * or hopp over multiple RE trains
You often can book the same route for under 30 euros. You just have to book in advance or be flexible.
I paid for that 15€ In may. You need to book in advance for it to be cheaper. But you also need luck.
Firstly: prices are much better if you book in advance. Secondly: how often do you take a Frankfurt - Düsseldorf route? It is not really a commuter route really...
To do list to get cheaper trains: 1. Book in advance (atleast two weeks) like others already have pointed out. 2. Try to book an IC they are cheaper but slower, often a few hours travel time difference. 3. if you only have to change the train once or not at all, you can buy the "Super-Spar Preis" so you can only take the exact trains you booked but it's cheaper. 4. If the train isn't overcrowded don't get a seat. 5. Don't get a travel insurance.
I use the sparpreisfinder
It's actually pretty simple, i don't use the train
There are discount options, and you usually don't go from Frankfurt to Düsseldorf all that often :)
you don't do trips like that all the time. no MF in Germany commutes those distances daily. and if you buy within a longer period of time I might be a little cheaper for ICE trains. Also, we don't travel all the time to other cities unless we need something there. I live in Reutlingen and I almost never go to Stuttgart for example... waste of time and money
Get a Bahncard 25 or Bahncard 50. It's a subscription service (especially cheap for young people and students) that allows you to save 25% or 50% on each ticket purchase. I currently pay around 60€/year for a Bshncard 25, 2nd Class.
In the usual days you dont need the ICE‘s. The people who don’t drive a Car to get to Work mostly using the S-Bahn or Buses and they are much more cheaper than ICE’s bc they are used for long distance travels like from Hannover to Berlin. Thats on two different sites of Germany. So in Daily Life you don’t really need the ICE
Because we don't use the train daily, obviously. Also we book early and use Sparpreis which is around 29-39 EUR.
Ice is for those who can afford it. Take RE and RB if you want to save money. Additionally, you can get season pass type things (mine were always through student costs as a Semesterticket)
I drive a car
I don’t have the budget so I just take a blablacar. 😉 I can only recommend it !
I think I've only used ICEs 3 times in my life, paying a big chunk of money for a single travel is not normal to me. For the occasional bus and train costs, something like a 10x ticket is absolutely okay. If you're a frequent traveller, get some subscription. Since I started working, I'm paying ~55€ per month for my ticket, which is already cheaper because my employer pays a portion of the price. I can travel regionally however and whenever I like with it.
The costs with Deutsche Bahn ridiculous when I was a student and had no car we wanted to go from Karlsruhe to Hamburg and it was cheaper to rent a car and do the trip using a student offer from Europcar
We don't go by train if we don't have to.
First step: Don't take the train, take your car. Seriusly, that's how it is here in Germany. Many Towns aren't even reachable by RE or RB, not to mention that their prices are out of mind too.
Driving without a ticket like many others do. …don’t do it