No need to pack your toiletries separately, take your shoes off, be put through a series of patience

This post comes courtesy of our old pal the devil s advocate. In response to Catherine cheap one way plane tickets Mack s recent one about finding cheap international train tickets I was inspired to have another go at finding some myself. In her post on Ethical Traveller, cheap one way plane tickets I m quoted alongside other train brains , as Catherine has us, such as Mark Smith (AKA the Man in Seat 61 ) Rail Europe, Loco2 and Richard Hammond of Green Traveller .
We dispense our top tips for finding cheap one way plane tickets the best rail fares in Europe and it s certainly well worth a read. Catherine does a great job in proving that finding bargain train fares abroad is not quite as impossible as some might think, but that s just half the story
It s not impossible to find these fares, but let s be honest, it s not exactly easy either. And  it s certainly nowhere near as simple as finding cheap airfares and therein lies the problem. I decided to test this out.
As an experiment, I took Deutsche Bahn s London Spezial fares as an example and went in search of the e49 tickets advertised on their site and mentioned in the post. I started looking from tomorrow s date onwards for the best train fares from London to Cologne, the closest German rail hub for UK travellers.
Now e49 is a cracking deal, I m sure you ll agree. OK, there are cheaper flights out there, but once you factor in the 20 30 euros you d pay for transfers,  I d bet that most people would happily stump up an extra twenty quid or so for the convenience and comfort that rail travel brings.
No need to pack your toiletries separately, take your shoes off, be put through a series of patience-sapping queues, be hememd into your seat and generally patronised into infantile submission by constant announcements and safety checks, or schlep to and from the aiports to the city centre.
And with a journey time now at a scorching 4.5 hours you wouldn t be sacrificing much of your precious travelling time either, once you ve factored in airport check in and transfer time there s probably less than half an hour in it, if that.  So wouldn t it be great to find some of these special fares readily available?
Having nothing better to do with my Saturday night (apart from try to think up Morrissey-related MozRank memes) I looked at every single day over the following 90 day period (the furthest ahead that fares are released online). Reader, I found none. The best I found was e69 single or e159 return. At least these e69 fares were plentiful enough. There were a few per week for almost every week.
I ll admit that I limited my search to the first half of the day, for departures spanning between 9am 3pm, so it s possible there may have been the odd supercheap fare after these times. The reason cheap one way plane tickets I did this is largely cheap one way plane tickets down to DBahn s booking system. It s pretty easy to flick forward to the next day and search again, changing the time slot would significantly slow the search.
If you think this is just unhelpful carping, then compare it to airfares for a moment. There s hundreds of third party flight agreggators out there dedicated to finding you the cheapest flight. For the most part, they re a breeze to use.
I did a quick search for flights between London and Cologne on Skyscanner (other flight aggregators are available of course folks, but they re a local business and the one I ve always used first!). In a matter of seconds I found one in April for e48. Skyscanner make things easy by showing you a nice, graphic bar chart of the cheapest fare available on each day of any one month.
I m sure there s a good reason, but I can t be the only one demanding an answer. Crossing Canada by train with Via Rail is not exactly cheap, but at least they have a section on their site dedicated to promoting their best discount deals.
Are there complex cheap one way plane tickets data issues cheap one way plane tickets that need to be resolved, convoluted issues around integrating different national railway systems? Or are the rail companies simply just too greedy to show their cheapest fares, or is it a combination of all of these factors as I suspect? cheap one way plane tickets What s the problem?
Here s another great usability example which rail companies could learn from. When you log on to the homepage of DoHop, you re given an eye-pleasing overview of all of the cheapest upcoming flight deals to various destinations from your usual departure airport, which it helpfully remembers from your last visit. Howz about we have something similar for train journeys? If someone cheap one way plane tickets could work it out it s bound to be a winner.
Now let s turn our attention back to Rail Europe for a moment. On their homepage they proudly trumpet their best fares: £69 return to Bruges or Paris, £99 to Amsterdam. Great.  But click on these and instead of taking you to some actual examples of these fares, you get a map of Belgium and a bunch of city gudies. Hmm
I ve talked about Rome2Rio before as they re one of the few companies who seem to be actively tackling this issue, at least in public. But they re a small, underexposed company still tweaking their excellent map-based search site which lets you compare multiple modes of transport in terms of price, time and Co2. So far it doesn t let you browse cheap one way plane tickets for the cheapest fares.
FlightFox (run by the people behind the excellent travel buddy site Globe Trooper ) have recently started employing travel bloggers to find cheap airfares for ordinary folks who can t be arsed looking themselves. Maybe they should cheap one way plane tickets run a similar challenge for those looking for bargain train fares?  Now that s one service I d consider paying for myself.
Jools Stone is a freelance journalist and marketer cheap one way plane tickets based in Edinburgh. He can also be found stoking the social media engine for the Train Chartering Company and writing regular travel cheap one way plane tickets and lifestyle articles for the Scotsman cheap one way plane tickets newspaper.
I totally agree with you. The Deutschebahn for one doesn t trumpet its cheapest cheap one way plane tickets options nor does Eurostar. cheap one way plane tickets Still, I think those who choose to fly from Paris to London have to have their heads examined.
I m currently planning cheap one way plane tickets a trip through Europe by rail and have all the different websites marked so I can keep checking them for release dates. That task would be a little easier if the sites helped me to be flexible by a day or two here and there.
When I first considered traveling to Europe, my head was full of tales of amazing Eurail pass deals and other affordable cheap one way plane tickets rail-based travel options. cheap one way plane tickets I don t know if I missed the golden window or if it was only a fantasy, but I never seemed to be able to find the magical discounts. I dislike airports and all the inconveniences they bring, so I still fantasize about the rail option. Hoping train companies get on the ball and join the internet age soon. Thanks for the post!
From a customer point of view, I completely agree with you and the other commenters here and I could write an essay in response. Train travel booking lags far behind air travel, and a lot of that has to do with the way the industry has developed over time.
Air travel technology is far more sophisticated, and the likes of Skyscanner benefit from global distribution systems that have been around for years. If train systems had developed cheap one way plane tickets at a similar rate, no doubt Railscanner may have been around by now Instead, rail companies and their corresponding booking systems and processes developed independently of one another and gave us the situation and frustration that we have today,
I m at Loco2 because a) I love overland travel and b) I think that there should be comparison sites for booking train travel, and it s what we re working toward. If you re having a particularly geeky day, you can read Jamie s (Loco2 s Director) post on Wired about it all and why we re pushing for open rail data:
Guess the main problem cheap one way plane tickets is that new rail operators are few and far between..it s only the onset of cheap no-frills airlines cheap one way plane tickets that brought down ticket prices on the planes. In the UK there are more train operators but you ve got to have a Phd as a sleuth to find the deals.
I really hope it opens up the market further (and it should) cheap one way plane tickets and bring prices cheap one way plane tickets down a bit. Maybe then railways might even start to consider that maybe having a longer booking horizon (longer than 90-120 cheap one way plane tickets days) will also allow collaborations with travel agents to offer rail package deals to the continent.
I hope so, and it s great that the EC is looking at it, and that you re pushing for it. It s obviously a very complex matter, making different national systems interoperable (oooh look, I used a fancy techgeek word there!) but I still don t get why the operators sites aren t more transparent cheap one way plane tickets about their best fares. Why can t I click to see them? That can t be hard to implement cheap one way plane tickets surely?
I m back again for a hat trick. Imho, operators do not have to make their sites more transparent and show their best fares, because in general (and I realise cheap one way plane tickets it s a slight sweeping statement) the people who take trains do it because of a prior commitment to overland/slow travel and will have a higher patience threshold cheap one way plane tickets for working it all out. In terms of winning people over to trains, or improving the situation for current customers, it doesn t seem like rail companies are overly fussed, because there are only a few who have ruled the roost for a while now. That said, more competition should improve the situation and there are moves to better pricing structures (like Trenitalia s advance minifare bargains). For us, as a small business, customer service and web usability are 2 things cheap one way plane tickets that are really important to us!
This information is great. I m traveling to Europe over the summer and will definitely need to save some cash, as I m a student and have a limitied budget! I m aware transportation costs will be the higest along with room and board, so any help in this domain is great. If anyone has any info or knowledge to share on this, please let me know!
It s worth planning your itinerary and knowing the number cheap one way plane tickets of trains and regions you plan to cover. Railpasses can be economical if you re spending a lot of time on the rails, but if you ll be concentrating on