European Rail Tickets: Deutsche Bahn fares better than rail agents
A Deutsche Bahn train in Berlin's main station. Photo by hidden europe.
By Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries—
Okay, we’ve said it before, but we’ll gladly say it again. Have Cheapos realised just how much rail fares in Europe can vary according to where you purchase your tickets?
We took a day out from our regular work with hidden europe magazine last week and conjured up a tempting palette of trips criss-crossing the continent. And then we compared the ticket prices on a national rail website (that of the Deutsche Bahn) with the prices offered for those journeys by rail ticketing agents based in Britain and North America. We took care to ensure that the tickets we purchased were in every case for exactly the same trains.
So a straight comparison, comparing like-with-like. Same class of travel, same comfy seat, same scenery slipping by outside the window – for all five routes in our basket of European rail trips.
The five routes we tested
- Berlin to London single (by day, depart after 9:00 AM, any route) on September 3: one adult, 2nd class.
- Amsterdam to Salzburg single (by day, no more than one change of train) on July 14: one adult, 1st class.
- London to Cologne via Brussels single (depart at 8:00 AM or later) on September 10: one adult, 2nd class.
- Berlin to Zagreb single via Hamburg (2 night stop) and Munich (2 night stop) on August 20: one adult, any class.
- Nuremberg to Dresden same day return (direct trains only) on June 20 for a family of five, 2nd class.
For each of these five journeys, we thought that the German Railways (viz. Deutsche Bahn) website at www.bahn.de would offer some reasonable fare advice, and so it did. Indeed, all five journeys could be booked online through their website.
Then we turned to agents selling rail tickets in North America and Britain to get quotes for precisely the same journeys. This was done first by online research, often followed up by telephone calls to check precise details.
The results
And guess what? The leading agencies specializing in European rail tickets always charged at least twice as much as would the Deutsche Bahn for exactly the same journey.
The key point here is that in most of Europe, rail operators have a whole raft of special promotional fares that massively undercut the regular tariffs (often with discount of more than 80% on the standard fare). But agents rarely offer those discounted fares, preferring to safeguard their hefty commission fees by selling only the full fare.
Comparing the fares
Now take a look at how those fares compared. Listed below are the Deutsche Bahn (DB) fares that were available for purchase around midday of Friday, June 12, 2009 followed by the cheapest fare quoted the same day by a leading North American or British agent (all sterling and dollar fares have been converted to euros just to make things clearer).
- Berlin to London (2nd class) DB: €49 / Agent Fare: €209
- Amsterdam to Salzburg (1st class) DB: €79 / Agent Fare: €255
- London to Cologne (2nd class) DB: €49 / Agent Fare: €106
- Berlin to Zagreb with stops in Hamburg and Munich (2nd class) DB: €29 / Agent Fare: €322
- Nuremberg to Dresden day return for family of 5 (2nd class) DB: €37 / Agent Fare: €705
Helpful advice?
We found one leading British agent who was extremely helpful on the phone, going to some lengths to suggest that for certain routes it might be wiser to get the tickets from a German source (but declining to give the specific name of the company or website).
A well-known North American agent emphasized that their dollar fares on offer would undercut anything we might purchase in Europe – a claim which is patently undermined by the results of our survey. The North American agent suggested that a rail pass might be a better bet for some of our journeys, and hinted that we would encounter a range of problems if we attempted to purchase directly from the Deutsche Bahn website.
Booking tickets in advance
The reality is that booking train tickets on www.bahn.de is pretty easy, even without a knowledge of German. The site has a decent English language interface, though in some instances you will find additional functionality on the German language website.
Also, it really helps to have a good knowledge of European patterns of service and railway geography. A good place to start is by studying the latest edition of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable and the same company’s Rail Map of Europe.
Booking well in advance is often the key to finding cheap fares, but our research found that plenty of discounted promotional fares are still available for travel this summer. And we did not cast around trying to dig up the cheapest possible travel dates, having fixed our palette of routes and travel dates before embarking on our research. If you would like the see the full results of our survey, just click here.
And, oh yes, just in case you were wondering, we were paid not a cent by the Deutsche Bahn to publish this!
About the authors: Susanne Kries and Nicky Gardner are regular contributors to EuroCheapo and together edit hidden europe magazine. They live in Berlin.
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Related Posts:
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- European Train Travel: Discounted Summer fares
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- European rail passes: Read this before you buy
- hidden europe: 2008 European Rail Schedule Highlights
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June 17th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
[...] passagens de trem pelos sites oficiais das ferrovias européias, o Eurocheapo divulgou hoje em seu blog uma pesquisa informal comparando o preço de 5 trechos escolhidos aleatoriamente. Foram comparados [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 4:11 am
Deutsche Bahn has a really bad customer service. I was planning to book a trip with my friends from Munich to Budapest with them. I called them several times but there wasn’t ANY English speaker available.
I think if you translate your website into English you should be able to deal with international requests!
June 21st, 2009 at 10:58 am
Hello Ellen
We fear you misjudge the Deutsche Bahn. They have a first class English language call centre, for which the telephone number is +44 8718 80 80 66. This is based in Britain and is staffed by a crack team of English speakers who know the German rail network inside out. They will mail tickets direct to non-European addresses.
The Deutsche Bahn office mentioned above is open from 9am to 8pm (UK time) from Mondays thru Fridays, and then also on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
The fact that you could not get an English speaker when you called a German train station is perhaps unsurprising. Turkish, French, Russian or Polish perhaps! Even German on a good day. But it is precisely to meet the needs of English speakers such as yourself that the Deutsche Bahn has that call centre at Surbiton in England.
You mention that you’d like to travel München to Budapest. Hope you still manage it. There’s a decent overnight train, called the Kálmán Imre, and also two direct daytime trains each day. The journey time is 7 to 9 hours.
Susanne and Nicky
June 26th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
I just wrote an extensive blog post, using your findings, on my decision to not purchase a Eurail pass this summer. Hopefully it could be helpful to other travellers in the same quandary.
Find it here:
http://russianvegan.blogspot.com/2009/06/to-eurail-or-not-to-eurail.html
August 31st, 2009 at 10:53 am
Are the standard fares listed on the Bahn website what you’d expect to see if you were to buy the tickets at the train station? Debating whether or not to buy the tickets in advance online or to wait and buy at the station?
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:00 pm
[...] national rail service rather than through RailEurope’s English-language site or overseas agents, especially for France’s TGV system. Fares can also be cheaper booking online than buying the [...]
January 7th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Does purchasing rail tickets through DB’s English-language call centre entail any additional fees, or are the prices on offer the same as those one would pay at a German train station?
January 8th, 2010 at 7:35 am
If you call the Deutsche Bahn (UK), based at Surbiton just south of London, you will pay the same price for a journey as if that exact same journey were booked online on the DB website. Curiously, for many journeys, this might work out a little cheaper than if you buy those same tickets in person at a Reisezentrum (that is, travel centre) at a German train station. For many categories of ticket you will pay an extra fee to queue at the Reisezentrum and get personal advice. These differences will be but slight – no more than a few euros. I have found the English language call centre staff infallibly helpful. You do however really need to know exactly what you want. They will cast around a bit to find the cheapest deals, but only within the parameters that you clearly specify.
Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries
editors / hidden europe magazine
January 9th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Hi: My husband and I will be traveling from Passau to Luxemborg April 10th, maybe stopping a day or two along the way to visit towns and/or friends. I’m trying to discover which routes will take us there, but can’t find “train routes” on line, so far. Any clues?
January 18th, 2010 at 11:12 am
Passau to Luxembourg offers so many wonderful options, each route taking in some fabulous scenery. The one way fare per person will be €29 if you book now on the Deutche Bahn website. Stopovers (which can be up to 48 hours) needs to be specified when booking.
Routes you might consider are:
Passau-Munich-Augsburg-Mainz-Koblenz-Trier-Luxembourg
Passau-Wuerzburg-Mainz-Koblenz-Trier-Luxembourg
I would strongly recommend that, whatever route you take, you end with the Mainz-Koblenz-Trier-Luxembourg stretch, which takes in the finest part of the Rhine Valley gorge and then the beautiful Moselle valley upstream from Koblenz.
If time is no object, and you have a week to spare, you could travel Passau to Trier on slow trains and boat, a superb transect across southern Germany, that might look as follows:
Passau-Muehldorf-Munich-Crailheim-Wertheim-Aschaffenburg-Mainz-Wiesbaden-Rudesheim-Koblenz-Cochem-Trier-Luxembourg. The Rhine and Mosel sections here could be done by boat. We described the Mosel boat routes in a feature published in hidden europe magazine issue 22. To get get the best of it, allow four days for the Rudesheim to Trier run by boat with overnight stops along the way.
Nicky