Fair fares and high speed

With adult return fares from London to Brussels and Paris currently available from £59 return, budget-conscious British travelers are well aware that in terms of price and city center to city center journey times Eurostar knocks spots off the competition from airlines. And this train service has subtly reshaped England’s relationship with Europe — most particularly since late 2007 when the stylish terminal at St. Pancras replaced dowdy Waterloo as the London launch-pad for trains to the continent.

Reshaping Europe

Londoners have suddenly realised that the journey from St. Pancras to Brussels takes no longer than the ride from St. Pancras to Sheffield. You can hop on Eurostar in London and alight at Calais (the first stop in France) less than an hour later.

But Eurostar is more than merely the canny way to reach Brussels and Paris. It is a good choice for a wonderful range of other journeys. For example, Eurostar offers winter-season direct trains from London to the French Alps. The current season is well underway with most services already heavily booked. The last return trains from Bourg-St-Maurice and Moûtiers-Salins are this year on April 13.

From London to Aix-en-Provence

Eurostar has long run a summer service from London to Avignon and that popular route to Provence is set to return for 2013, but with an interesting twist. Direct trains to Avignon will this year run for a longer summer season (with the first departure from London on May 4 and the last on August 31). During the months of May and June, these trains will be extended beyond Avignon to Aix-en-Provence.

Breaking records

Aix thus becomes the most distant point from London to which it has ever been possible to travel on a direct train from London. Way back in pre-Eurostar days, there were direct overnight sleeper services from London to the continent. The trains cars were ferried over the English Channel in a boat. For a time there were even through carriages to Switzerland, but never has there been anything to match this new direct train to Aix.

Eurostar will purr from St. Pancras to Aix-en-Provence, a journey of 1,215 km (about 755 miles), in just over six hours. Return fares to Aix can still be booked from just £109.

How to book tickets

To grab the best fares on Eurostar, bear in mind the forward booking horizons that apply to your intended route. For the capital city services from London to Paris and Brussels, tickets go on sale four months before departure. That same forward booking horizon applies for tickets to Calais and Lille.

But tickets for other Eurostar destinations go on sale very much longer in advance. For example, the company runs a direct service from London to Marne la Vallée – Chessy (a route that is hugely popular with British families bound for Disneyland, but also useful for the excellent connections at Marne la Vallée into the French TGV network). And tickets on those trains can already be booked right through to October 2013.

Tickets for all direct trains to Avignon and Aix in 2013 can already be booked on the Eurostar website — right through to August 31, 2013. But if you are looking to book a trip to the ski slopes on one of Eurostar’s direct trains to the Alps for next winter, you’ll have to wait a while yet. We expect tickets for those services to be released for sale in July 2013.

The post Eurostar Expands its Network: London to Aix-en-Provence from £109 return appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

When winter strikes

In three of the last five winters, we have had at least one trip where we were seriously delayed on journeys back to our Berlin base, in each case not reaching home until a day later than anticipated. And that is just what happened last weekend: what should have been a routine journey from London to Berlin turned out to be a 25-hour epic.

“Hop on the Next Train” stamped on the back of a ticket.

The key to getting the best out of Europe’s railways is having a through ticket from origin to destination, which was just what we had on Saturday when we set out from London with through tickets to Berlin (a snip at just €49 per person).

Stuck in Brussels

Eurostar was as magnificent as ever, speeding us through the Channel Tunnel and on through wintry Flanders to Brussels Midi where we arrived just after 2 p.m. But the onward connecting train to Germany was cancelled due to bad weather, and many other services were heavily delayed.

Western Europe’s principal rail operators cooperate in an alliance called Railteam. And if things go wrong, you can ask to be rerouted on other Railteam member trains to reach your final destination.

Railteam: Hop on the next train

Many cheaper European rail tickets (the ones we love) restrict you to specific trains and routes. But when trains are canceled or connections missed due to a late-running train, you can ask any railway official to stamp the reverse side of your ticket. This confirms that you have encountered problems along the way, and that you are now entitled to use alternative trains or even a very different route to reach your final destination.

The Railteam stamp (nicely embellished with the slogan “Hop on the Next Train”) is your passport to flexibility in times of trouble.

Onward via Paris

We were rerouted from Brussels on a stylish Thalys train (all lush vibrant pink and purple velour) to Paris, where there was just time for a quick supper before hopping on an overnight City Night Line (CNL) train to Germany.

The Paris to Berlin sleeper would have been our first choice, but that was booked out, so we opted for the CNL train to Hamburg where luck was very much on our side as we grabbed the last remaining two-berth sleeper (for which we paid a supplementary sleeper charge – crisp linen sheets come at a cost, but we do like our creature comforts).

Snoozing to Hamburg

This was a perfect overnight journey. We both slept like logs, awakening on Sunday to see a glorious winter sunrise over northern Germany. We continued with a sleek Deutsche Bahn ICE train to Berlin, enjoying breakfast on the way and arriving home early afternoon.

What could have been a nightmare turned out to be a happily memorable journey. All thanks to the Railteam alliance.

The moral: Next time you run into trouble on the rails, make sure you get your ticket stamped to confirm the disruption. Train crews and station staff will provide the necessary stamp, and once it’s there you can exploit the flexibility of the network to reach your destination.

Don’t get flustered or annoyed. Delays are all part of traveling and with a little patience you’ll still reach your destination in the end. And perhaps with some unanticipated adventures along the way.

The post When Rail Journeys are Disrupted: Meet the Railteam Alliance appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

So much well-justified praise is heaped on Eurostar’s capital city links that it is easy to overlook that the rail service through the Channel Tunnel is good for more than merely quick hops to nearby capitals.

Direct trains to the Alps

Last Saturday, Eurostar kicked off its regular season of direct ski-trains, serving some of France’s premier winter sports resorts from London and two other stations in south-east England: Ebbsfleet and Ashford.

Ready to board in St Pancras. Photo © hidden europe magazine

Although the trains are aimed fair and square at the winter sports market, you certainly don’t need to be a skier to use these trains which are a very fine way of traveling from England to the Savoie area of eastern France. The services run through mid-April and operate to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, stopping along the way at Moûtiers-Salins-Brides-les-Bains and Aime-La Plagne. The latter, with its cottage-style stone station building, surely rates as the most rural station on the Eurostar network.

Dash South to Avignon

Tickets go on sale tomorrow (December 22, 2011) for Eurostar’s 2012 season of direct trains from London and Ashford to Avignon in the south of France. Travelers can speed from Kent to the heart of the Provence in less than five hours.

And whereas most French high-speed trains serve Avignon TGV station, the Eurostar services drop passengers at Avignon Centre, just a stone’s throw from the ancient city wall and the Old Town. For Londoners keen to catch some southern sun, the direct Eurostar service to Avignon is hugely more appealing than tackling airport crowds.

Eurostar operates a two-class service on the Avignon route (compared with the choice of three classes on their capital city services). Fares start at £109 return in Standard Class and, for passengers wanting extra space with complimentary meals and drinks, return tickets in Standard Premier are from £249.

Connections through Brussels

We traveled last Wednesday from London to Cologne, an easy 4hr 20min journey including a slick connection from Eurostar onto a German ICE train at Brussels. You can use the Eurostar website to book through journeys from London to Aachen and Cologne in Germany, as well as to any station in the Netherlands or in Belgium.

City center to city center travel times often undercut comparable journeys made by air. For example, the fastest rail connections from London to Rotterdam (changing at Brussels) take less than four hours.

Beyond Paris

Travelers from the UK can use the Eurostar website to book through tickets from London via Paris to a dozen Swiss cities and to over 60 stations across France.

We used this latter option last month on a London to Strasbourg journey, which took 5hrs 15mins. That included time for a change of trains in Paris, requiring an easy ten-minute walk from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de l’Est. One-way fares on this routing start at £55.

Some travelers worry that many itineraries via Paris require a change of station in the French capital. And that is where Lille Europe station comes in handy, as it offers seamless connections between Eurostar and the French high-speed network without the need to switch stations. For example, the same lead-in fare of £55 from London to Strasbourg is also available on routings via Lille.

You can book with Eurostar from London to Lille and connect there onto direct trains to Nice, Toulouse, Marseille, Bordeaux and dozens of other destinations across France. Again, through bookings for most itineraries can be made on the Eurostar website.

Other Links

The regular direct Eurostar trains from London to Marne la Vallée-Chessy are operated mainly for visitors heading to the Disneyland complex east of Paris, but can also be used to link to and from connecting TGV services.

And we have found Eurostar useful for short hops on the continent. For example, Eurostar trains can be used to travel from Lille to both Brussels and Calais.

Rail pass options

Interested in seeing a full list of rail pass options? Visit our booking partner, Rail Europe, to compare rates, destinations covered and see their latest promotions.

The post Eurostar Links: Beyond Paris and Brussels appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

A great weekend bargain in Germany

On the weekends, for example, travelers can roam the length and breadth of Germany by local and regional trains using the Schönes Wochenende Ticket (SWT), which allows unlimited travel for just €37. And the beauty of the SWT is that you can take along up to four other travelers without having to pay an extra cent.

We have friends who last Sunday traveled from Aachen (on the Belgian border) right across Germany to Salzburg using the SWT, effectively paying €7.40 each for a journey of over 500 miles that took in the Rhine gorge and much more fine scenery. The SWT can even be used to selected stations beyond Germany’s borders (i.e. Salzburg in Austria, Schaffhausen in Switzerland, Wissembourg in France and Szczecin in Poland).

Cheap regional tickets in Germany

While the German SWT is a weekend-only deal, regional tickets in Germany give the freedom to roam within a more limited area on any day, but only after 9 a.m. Mondays through Fridays. These tickets are named after the federal states (Länder in German) in which they are principally marketed. These tickets are typically priced at €20 for one person or €28 for a group of up to five people traveling together.

Roaming Germany’s Baltic coast

The Länder tickets are often valid for substantially larger areas than the federal states after which they are named.

You might expect the “Schleswig-Holstein” ticket only to be valid in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. Think again. This ticket also covers the German states of Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, not to mention selected cross-border stretches of railway into Denmark and Poland. This validity area thus covers Germany’s entire Baltic coast and offshore islands (several of which have causeways carrying railways to the mainland). So devotees of branch lines can use the Schleswig-Holstein ticket to travel very cheaply along rural rail routes from Padborg in Danish Jutland to the Polish town of Swinoujscie.

Similarly, the Sachsen ticket is valid far beyond the borders of Saxony. It can be used over a huge area that encompasses part or all of five German states, two cross-border routes into Poland, and one through the Czech Republic.

As with all Länder tickets, and with the Schönes Wochenende Ticket (SWT), just buy the ticket at the ticket machine before hopping on your first train. You can book a ticket online, but there is really no need to do this. The online tickets are no cheaper than those sold at station ticket machines.

Criss-crossing borders

In many border areas of Europe,  special rail passes are available, even to non-residents, to promote mobility in frontier regions. These are superb deals, often covering not merely the immediate border region but substantial areas well beyond the frontier.

The following are particularly good bargains for one-day tickets:

1. The Euregio Bodensee Tageskarte gives unlimited travel around Lake Constance (called the Bodensee in German) including ferries and selected rail routes in Austria, Germany and Switzerland: €28

2. The Euregio Maas-Rhein Tageskarte permits rail and bus travel throughout parts of eastern Belgium, the Limburg area of the Netherlands and over the German border to Aachen and beyond: €15.50

3. The EuroNeisse Ticket covers a large part of northern Bohemia (Czech Republic), part of Silesia (Poland) and eastern Saxony (Germany) and affords unlimited travel on trains, buses and trams: €10

All the passes mentioned in this post give travelers the chance to really explore a region or make longer hops at a bargain price. Local trains with frequent stops along the way often give a sense of engaging with landscape and communities in a way that is less possible on fast express services.

The post Exploring Germany: Rail passes for local train services appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Why? Because the RER (regional train) and Paris Metro ticket machines only accept “EC” credit cards that are security-chip enabled. American credit cards are not equipped with this technology and, for the most part, don’t work.

Getting into Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport… with an American credit card

I think that the easiest (and most economical) way into Paris from Charles de Gaulle is the city’s regional train, the RER. The train departs several times an hour from train stations in Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 at CDG. The trip takes between 25-35 minutes to central Paris, depending on whether it’s running express or making local stops along the way.

RER tickets cost €8.20 per person, each way. Dozens of ticket machines are located in the airport terminals, making it (hypothetically) easy to grab a ticket and hop onto a train. However, the machines only accept EC credit cards. When we’ve tried to purchase a ticket with an American-issued card, the screen simply states “Card not valid.”

Machines also take euro notes and coins, but if you’ve just arrived in Europe, you may not be arriving with any euro currency. Of course, you could first swing by an airport ATM, although lines can be long and ATMs often dispense bills in high denominations, not exactly handy for an 8 euro ticket.

The solution?

One solution is to buy your ticket from the ticket counter. I have resorted to this in the past—which is never fun, as it usually involves waiting in a long line. However, the ticket agents do accept American credit cards. Many American tourists, faced with this solution, get in line.

I finally got my ticket.

During my trip to Paris this month, I went through all the motions: I tried my MasterCard on two machines and was rejected by both. I then turned and gazed at the line snaking out from the ticket office. I was certain to spend the first 45 minutes of my time in Paris waiting to pay for a regional train ticket. Sad.

But then I noticed several peppy, smiling customer service personnel drifting about the floor, between the machines, asking bemused tourists if they needed help.

Just for kicks, I approached a young woman and explained my dilemma. “The machine won’t take my credit card.”

“You’re trying to use an American card, right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“This might not work, but there’s one machine over here that sometimes takes American cards,” she said, and led me past several clusters of ticket machines to one particular, inconspicuous machine, which appeared to me to be just like the others.

And sure enough, it worked. For some reason, that one machine accepted my MasterCard and saved me from the RER ticket line of tears.

Good luck with those Metro tickets!

Metro tickets… Rejection, part deux

Over the past several years, Paris has closed down Metro ticket booths in many stations and replaced them with automated vending machines. (In many cases, the ticket booths have been replaced with information booths. But they won’t sell you tickets.)

The ticket machines are pretty easy to use, unless—you guessed it!—you’re trying to use an American credit card. In short: They’re not accepted.

The solution: Pay in cash (some machines only accept coins, while others accept bills) or go to one of the Metro stations that still actually has a ticket counter (these can be found in the most-popular stations in central Paris).

What do you think?

Have you had any issues with using an American (or any other) credit card in Paris or other French cities like Marseille or Lyon? Have you been able to use your card? Do you have another creative solution? Tell us about it!

The post Paris Transit: Buying RER and Metro tickets with an American credit card appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

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
1. Berlin to London single (by day, depart after 9:00 AM, any route) on September 3: one adult, 2nd class.
2. Amsterdam to Salzburg single (by day, no more than one change of train) on July 14: one adult, 1st class.
3. London to Cologne via Brussels single (depart at 8:00 AM or later) on September 10: one adult, 2nd class.
4. Berlin to Zagreb single via Hamburg (2 night stop) and Munich (2 night stop) on August 20: one adult, any class.
5. 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).

1. Berlin to London (2nd class) DB: €49 / Agent Fare: €209
2. Amsterdam to Salzburg (1st class) DB: €79 / Agent Fare: €255
3. London to Cologne (2nd class) DB: €49 / Agent Fare: €106
4. Berlin to Zagreb with stops in Hamburg and Munich (2nd class) DB: €29 / Agent Fare: €322
5. 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!

The post European Rail Tickets: Deutsche Bahn fares better than rail agents appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Plan ahead: Rail travel for next year

Rail travelers can still take a while refining their travel plans for summer 2009, for although many of the schedules are now becoming available, tickets do not generally go on sale until two to four months prior to travel.

The extension of the Europa-Spezial scheme to encompass many more countries means that canny travellers can now plan long treks across Europe with rail fares that greatly undercut even the lowest air fares.

Europa-Spezial: Great value for money

Europa-Spezial fares can be booked online at the German Railways website. Tickets generally go on sale 90 days prior to travel, so bookings can already be made for January 2009.

Choose your trains carefully and you can travel from Budapest to Cologne for just €39 one way – and you can include stopovers on the way (each for a maximum of 48 hours). We chose a Budapest – Prague – Berlin – Cologne routing, with en route stops for two nights in both Prague and Berlin, and found plenty of availability for mid-January 2009 at the lead-in €39 fare.

Other gems there for the taking are €29 one-way from Hamburg to Vienna (via Prague), €39 from Paris or Copenhagen to any station in Germany, and a €39 fare that will take you from any station in Belgium or the Netherlands to Basel on the Swiss border or to Salzburg in Austria.

First class options: Worth considering, even for Cheapos

If the lowest fare for your selected route is already sold out, you can still buy a Europa-Spezial ticket, but it will be priced at a higher tariff tier (e.g. €49, €69, and up). Europa-Spezial fares are also available for first class, and these are really worth checking.

Berlin to Vienna (either direct or with a one or two night stopover in Dresden) for €49 first class sounds almost too good to be true. If you find little availability for Europa-Spezial fares in second class, just have a look to see if the cheapest first class option is still available. First class sells out less quickly, and we have found many examples of journeys where remaining first class availability is cheaper than heavily-booked second class.

The great thing about these Europa-Spezial fares is that, subject to availability at the time of booking, you really can use them on the fast express services. The only real snag is that you must commit yourself to date and time of travel, but at such rock bottom fares that is scarcely a burden.

The new Europa-Spezial fares, along with long-standing promotions like discounted TGV fares in France, might really tip the balance as you weigh up whether it is worth buying a rail pass for 2009.

The post Bargain trains: Cheap rail fares across Europe for 2009 appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.