Save on extended travel in Germany with a BahnCard

October 8, 2008

If you’re planning on spending a significant amount of time in Germany and traveling around a bit, it may be worthwhile getting a rail card (BahnCard). This card is valid for a year and will give you a discount of either 25%, 50% or 100% off the ticket price.

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The BahnCard 25 costs 55€ for second class (110€ for first class) and starts saving you money if you spend over 200€ a year on rail travel. The BahnCard 50 is 220€ or 440€ for second or first class, respectively, while the BahnCard 100 - at 3500€ for second class - I think we can ignore as not being particularly appropriate for the casual tourist.

These cards only give you the respective discounts on the ticket price. This means that you will still have to pay the extra few euros to reserve a seat, something I heartily recommend if you are traveling major routes (eg. Berlin - Frankfurt) at peak times. By which I mean Friday nights - forget about getting on one of those trains without a seat reservation on a Friday night. It’s squished standing room only, and that for 5 hours. Not fun. Berlin to Frankfurt will normally cost you around 100€ each way, so the BahnCard 50 will start paying itself off after only two return journeys of that length.

Buying the BahnCard is a bit complicated online as the shop portion of the Deutsche Bahn website is only in German. However the Reisezentrum (Travel Center) in the larger train stations will organise one for you. One word of warning: the BahnCard will be automatically renewed after one year if you do not cancel that in writing at least six weeks before the expiry date.

If your needs aren’t that extensive, there are other discount offers on the German rail network: Happy Weekend Tickets and Länder-tickets (~27€ for five people for one day in a single German state) offer cheap group fares, while the Saving fares give 25% or 50% discounts on return fares under specific conditions.

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