Imagine you want to go from some random place in Germany to the capital. Maybe because it is LinuxTag. We learned that you can try to apply international fares. In the case of Berlin, the Netzplan for Berlin indicates that several candidate train stations exist: Rzepin, Kostrzyn, or Szczecin. However, we’re not going to explore that now.
Instead, we have a look at other (third party) offers. Firstly, you can always get a Veranstaltungsticket. It’s a ticket rated at 99 EUR for a return trip. The flexible ticket costs 139 EUR and allows you to take any train, instead of fixed ones. Is that a good price? Let’s check the regular price for the route Karlsruhe ←→ Berlin.
The regular price is 142 EUR. Per leg. So the return trip would cost a whopping 284 EUR. Let’s assume you have a BahnCard 50. It costs 255 EUR and before you get it, you better do the math whether it’s worth it. Anyway, if you have that card, the price halves and we have to pay 71 EUR for a leg or 142 for the return trip. That ticket is fully flexible, so any train can be taken. The equivalent Veranstaltungsticket costs 139, so a saving of 3 EUR, or 2%.
Where to get that Veranstaltungsticket you ask? Well, turns out, LinuxTag offered it, itself. You call the phone number of the Bahn and state your “code”. In the LinuxTag case it was “STATION Berlin”. It probably restricts your destination options to Berlin. More general codes are easily found on the Web. Try “Finanz Informatik”,
“TMF”, or “DOAG”.
I don’t expect you to be impressed by saving 2%. Another option is to use bus search engines, such as busliniensuche.de, fernbusse.de, or fromatob.de. You need to be a bit lucky though as only a few of those tickets are available. However, it’s worth a shot as they cost 29 EUR only.
That saves you 80% compared to the original 142 EUR, or 60% compared to the 71 EUR with the BC 50. That’s quite nice, already. But we can do better. There is the “Fernweh-Ticket” which is only available from LTUR. It costs 26 EUR and you need to poll their Web Interface every so often to get a chance to find a ticket. I intended to write a crawler, but I have not gotten around to do it yet…
With such a ticket you save almost 82% or 63% compared to the regular price. Sweet! Have I missed any offer that worth mentioning?
LTUR all the way. you now get international destinations too! Thanks for summarising all the different things.