Who rips you off more – Ryanair or Swiss Rail? The Swiss win hans down!

Posted on November 1, 2011 by James

An open blog post to @sbbnews

Now let’s make this clear – this is not an attempt to compare cost per mile or anything related to the fare itself. It is a simple expression of complete frustration at the total confusion caused by the booking system of a network I know and love.

I have visited Swizterland many times, and have always travelled by train, usually taking advantage of one of the four day Swiss travel passes to continue across the country. In Switzerland, the rail network is a natural extension of the flight, as the two main airports of Geneva and Zurich are not just connected to their respective city centres, but also to a huge selection of destinations beyond.

The fact that the Swiss travel network is so well integrated needs little introduction – the trains are really just the start, with onward links provided by bus, ship and even cable car, although these often require a supplement, as do many of the scenic mountain lines.

So what have they done now to incur my wrath? I am trying to do a simple comparison of some onward journeys by rail, just looking at connections between major cities like Geneva and Zurich. I said last week that trying to get public transport information from UK public transport website Transport Direct was like having teeth extracted. Trying to book a train with Swiss Railways is like having your face smashed in, and then going to the dentist for repair work.

Here’s my list of gripes:

Try booking a ‘supersaver’ ticket – firstly, you can only do so upto 15 days in advance, not much good for someone planning a holiday. Surely these fares are supposed to encourage early booking?
No way of finding the best fare, just trawl through different times and see what comes up.
Double up! Clicking through to the supersaver price includes the standard price in the basket – e.g. Basel to Bern discounted CHF 15.20 (approx. £10) + Standard CHF 38.00, gives a total of CHF 52.40 – why would anyone buy two tickets for the same train?
‘Almost free of charge’ supersaver tickets – sounds like Ryanair again, but we’re initially only offered sample prices to Lucerne. Eventually a sample price from Geneva to Zurich is offered at CHF 28 – with the best price found being nearly twice that.
Zurich and Basel confusion – now I know enough German to understand that HB stands for Hauptbahnhof or Grand Central, but most users would not. I also understand that the SBB in ‘Basel SBB’ stands for Swiss Railways, as opposed to the side of the station that serves France. Again, I would not expect most users to understand this geographical quirk, unless they had been there. We are also lazy, so we type ‘Zurich’, not ‘Zürich’ or Zuerich – after all, the menu does at least start in English.
Enter name and date of birth. Why on earth should I give these details just to get a price quote? And again, the British way of writing dates is with forward slashes, not dots – not that we should dictate this to our European cousins, but an intelligent system should either not ask in the first place, offer a drop down, or understand both.
No indication of train type (minor gripe). This is more of a geeky personal preference, but some of the mainline services, for example between Zurich and Milan, feature some impressive mountainous sections, which are much more enjoyable when onboard a tilting train. The only was of knowing which trains are tilting is to see if bikes are not conveyed – as the ETR 470 sets don’t take them.
Other fees? I haven’t even got to whether or not there is a credit card fee, service charge or booking fee, as most users would be long gone by now.

Note: Isn’t this all a bit Anglo-centric? After all, Switzerland has 4 official languages, none of which is English?

A Swiss visitor to the UK could indeed quite rightly complain that Virgin Trains or any other operating company don’t offer them the opportunity to book in German or French – and as for Italian or Romansh!

Yet, like it or not, English is the language of international travel. Of course, speaking the local lingo in any destination is always a big bonus, but it helps to have a website which helps you get there in the first place.

In that respect, I’m afraid SBB.ch is a total fail.

7 Ways to Beat Air Passenger Duty Rises

Posted on November 2, 2009 by James

Yesterday, Air Passenger Duty on short haul flights went up by £1, but much larger increases were imposed on long haul and premium service flights. These taxes are set to rise again in November 2010 – and even if a change of government looks likely, there is little to suggest that the Tories will reverse this policy.

This list was due for a little bit more embellishment, which I’ll try and get round to later in the week, but in the meantime, here are the key suggestions:

Take a Private Jet – you will pay no taxes at all this way.
Let Michael O’Leary pay your taxes – can’t afford a private jet? Look out for Ryanair’s special offers when they pay the taxes for you.
Island hop around Scotland – ‘public service obligation’ flights in the Scottish Highlands & Islands are exempt from duty – and the views are simply stunning.
Take the ferry or Eurostar to Paris or Amsterdam, and fly long haul from there – or even hop over to any European hub on a budget flight, and then continue from there. APD stings you much harder on long haul flights.
Offset the tax by saving on duty free, or not paying other airline hidden charges – ok, so the government sees air passengers as an easy target. Chill out, and enjoy some savings on duty free. The best deals might be at your destination – shop around to see, but even though there aren’t any duty free allowances on short haul flights to EU destinations, these aren’t the ones with the highest taxes. Why not get the best of both worlds and fly via Switzerland or Norway – short haul destinations which also have a duty free allowance. If you don’t have a Visa Electron card by now, then you really can’t whinge about air passenger duty if you are booking flights with a low cost carrier like Easyjet or Ryanair. The taxes aren’t usually avoidable, but the card handling fees always are.
Go all the way by train- this is easier than you might think, and thanks to the new Eurostar links to the continent, you’d be amazed how far you can get in a day from London – and think how much more you see on the way. Don’t fancy a long journey home by train? At least the return flight won’t be taxed so badly, as APD is only levied on the outbound journey – Alistair hasn’t thought out a way of taxing people to come in to the UK yet, but don’t encourage him too much!
Take the ferry to Morocco (from Gibraltar) – ok, so the ferry fare will cost you about as much as the tax you will save, but Gibraltar is a great place to land, and why not add a ferry trip to your African adventure?

At last they admit it – flight taxes pay for bank bailouts

Posted on November 2, 2009 by James

At long last, Chancellor Alistair Darling has said what we’ve known all along – that flight taxes (Air Passenger Duty) are used to sort out the dodgy banks, and nothing to do with the environment. Speaking to Northeast website The Journal last week, Darlin said:

I am quite blunt about it, we need to raise money to pay for some of the things we have done. If unemployment goes up there is a cost obviously to the family, there is cost in increased benefits, Northern Rock has cost a lot of money.

Now to be honest, no-one is going to step forward and offer their sympathy for the bankers, but many would still say that the bailouts had to be made in order to save the financial services industry. So, should airlines be made to suffer so another sector can survive?

Well, Darling seems to think so:

But if you think about it, what we are doing is putting a pound on to your average ticket, which about three quarters of people travel on. And you consider the cost of an air ticket, I don’t think a pound is that unreasonable.

The problem of course is that it isn’t “just a pound” on the average flight ticket. Last year, air passenger duty was doubled overnight in a move which saw one of the few taxes to have been reduced under the Labour government get re-stealthed. To make matters worse and add insult to injury, taxes had to be collected on flights which were already paid for – as if the chancellor (and former transport minister) was more interested in act of vengeance than a fair tax. Of course, Mr Darling, as MP for Edinburgh Central, is a fully paid-up member of the “you shouldn’t fly but I will” brigade, and that’s long before we bring up the issue of MP’s expenses.

Unlike some airlines and passengers, I don’t have a problem with air passengers paying their way through a ‘reasonable’ level of taxation – and I fully accept that the aviation industry must pay for its environmental costs. But let’s not forget that whereas motoring taxes are supposed to pay for the upkeep of the roads, usage of airports is already covered by separate airport handling fees levied by the (predominantly) private companies who run Britain’s airports.

Environmental costs should be covered by a global carbon trading agreement, due to be discussed in Copenhagen next month. Of course there’s loads of other arguments about the benefits of switching passengers from short hop flights to high speed rail, but that’s for another time. Or maybe, if that’s where APD funds were being directed, the travelling public wouldn’t mind so much. Mr Darling, if you are reading this, that isn’t an excuse to double APD again on you’re next whim!

Is it time for Ryanair to start over-booking?

Posted on October 7, 2009 by James

Right now, I should be somewhere in Scandinavia, probably crossing the glorious Oresund Bridge between Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmo in Sweden. I booked my outbound flight from Birmingham to Billund via one of Ryanair’s £1 special offers, but never got round to booking the rest of the trip, and then other commitments this week meant I couldn’t go anyway.

So what put me off booking the rest of the trip? Well, the problem is that when you can get a flight for £1, all taxes and hidden charges included (I have an Electron Card), everything else just seems so much more expensive. I wanted to head all the way up to Helsinki in Finland, mainly to visit the garden suburb of Tapiola, which is reputed to be one of the best places to live in the World. But by the time I had added in the cost of a ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki (I like to get in a couple of ferry trips each year), and all the rail travel, it all got out of hand very quickly – and that’s long before I’ve had my first pint of Carlsberg!

So I wonder just how many other people avail themselves of Ryanair’s free or £1 flights, and then don’t turn up? Or are people who do this so keen to protect their ‘investment’ that these special offer flights actually have a very good turn out? Whatever the case, Ryanair have always claimed that they never over-book passengers, i.e. if each flight has 189 seats, they only sell 189, and no more. This doesn’t sound like particularly sound economics, considering that there are always going to be no-shows, and logic would imply that the proportion of no-shows goes up as the fares get cheaper. With Ryanair’s keenness to put bums on seats at any cost, it does seem surprising that they won’t oversell their flights by even one or two seats.

Anyway, as I write this, Ryanair have just launched another £1 ticket sale. This time, I might see if I can nail down a return flight as well as an outbound one, and make sure I get to go somewhere a little bit cheaper than Denmark and Sweden.

Weigh me up before you go go

Posted on March 30, 2009 by James

One of the most frequent complaints at the moment about low-cost airlines — and even some very high cost airlines nowadays as well, especially for flying across the pond — is the amount being charged for checked baggage, sometimes up to £16 for shorthaul flights within Europe.

Personally, I’ve always felt that it is much fairer to charge for baggage, rather than giving people who want to carry a lot more with them a free ride, but the flipside of this is that the legacy airlines which don’t charge for checked baggage can suddenly become much better value when compared with their rivals which do.

When baggage charges started at just a few pounds each way, the little bit extra didn’t make that much difference, but £16 doubled could make a seemingly expensive £100 flight with an airline like British Airways, which would also include free food and drink, become much better value than a £70 return flight with Easyjet, and this is before you add in the cost of getting to and from a more remote airport like Stansted or Luton.

However, these extra luggage charges really do just reinforce the argument in favour of travelling light, not to mention making sure that you do know how much you are carrying before you leave. For this, we would have to recommend buying some form of travel scale — I have a simple lightweight analogue scale, made by Gotravel products, and available in the travel department of many major stores.

Here are a few personal tips for travelling light:

Clothes — how many do you really need? Hotel laundry might still be ridiculously expensive, but you would probably be better off by washing your clothes halfway through a holiday at a local launderette, rather than paying for extra baggage charges. It’s always worth taking some clothing to cater for sudden changes in the weather, but if you are packing tight, isn’t it better to wear that raincoat through the airport, rather than having to take an extra checked bag?
Camera — I used to travel with a large SLR where I went, sometimes complete with long zoom lenses, but now I just take a compact digital camera. Where are your pictures likely to end up? If they are only going to be shared with friends on the Internet, resolution is never really going to be that important, so a decent compact digital camera should give you the versatility you need, especially if you can find a model with a high enough ISO for flexibility when taking photos at night. even if you do plan to print your images, aspect ratio (print shops still default at 3:2) might be a more important consideration than megapixels, as a standard 6×4″ print at 300 dpi will need just 2 megapixels (1800x1200px).
Laptop — are you travelling for business or pleasure? If the former, then lightweight models can certainly save considerable extra hassle, and if the latter, then I hope you can just ditch the laptop and enjoy yourself! Same goes for PDAs etc, but if you must get yourself connected, you can always use a hotel business centre or Internet cafe.
Adapters and chargers — I used to take a whole load of different power adapters, especially to go with my laptop on camera, but as their technology has improved, most portable devices will go for several days now without being charged. Many hotels will have chargers for standard mobile phones behind the reception desk. Can you get by with just taking a spare battery?
Buying stuff on the way — buying souvenirs and other products might be part of a travel experience, but they could end up by lumping you with a whole load of extra charges to get home. Always bear in mind that if your goal is hand luggage only, you won’t be able to take any liquids over 125 mL through security, so it is best not to even look at those cheap wines and spirits. With the buying power of modern supermarkets, not to mention online, can you actually get the product you are looking at back home anyway? Work out the difference in price, and the cost of getting it home, and make your own decision. If you’re getting someone a gift, it might well be cheaper to post it direct from wherever you are — this will save you lugging it around all day anyway. Using the postal system might also be a way of avoiding checked baggage charges for your own stuff – so if you want a little bit more space in your bag for non-liquid gifts, why not leave the task of taking your dirty laundry home to the Postal Service?

If you do find yourself scrunching everything down just to fit in one bag to get through the airport, you might want to take a foldable backpack so that you can put your coat in it once you have reached your sunny destination.

Upcoming articles and blog posts

Posted on March 4, 2009 by James

I thought I’d drop a quick note about articles we’ve got in production, and give any readers an opportunity to add their comments and suggestions before they go live:

Hidden charges – we know how much you hate them. So we’ll be doing a full A-Z of charges, and breaking it down airline by airline.
Airport architecture – low cost airlines might claim to hate ‘marble palaces’, but we’re sure that passengers prefer them to portakabins. We’ll take a look at some of the most impressive airports around the world – including major hubs and low cost airports.
Travel tips – I think this is a theme that could run forever, but we’re always keen to hear yours.
Site updates.
Alternative airports – we know that Hahn isn’t really anywhere near Frankfurt, but how good is your Geography? If the winning university challenge team stumbled to work out if Frankfurt was north or south of Cologne, how much should we expect from our site users? We’ll take a look at airports which might get you where you want to go much quicker (or cheaper) than the airport which serves the city you are trying to get to. Some are in different countries – or in one case, on another continent.
Detailed city pair guides. We’ve picked some top destinations and provided in-depth commentary about how to get there from various airports around the UK. For example, if you are looking for flights from Edinburgh to Philadelphia, we suggest taking direct flights from Glasgow instead. Alternatively, if you are travelling from Bristol, you will often be routed via New York, and then by train down to Philly.

This list will expand over the next few days, and we’ve also got a few hidden surprises coming up, so please stay tuned.

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