Teen flew from Sheffield to Essex via Berlin because it was cheaper than train | Hacker News Reader

Teen flew from Sheffield to Essex via Berlin because it was cheaper than train

metro.co.uk

48 pointsawqrre32 comments

Blithering nonsense. You can buy an advance ticket for 33.50, saving time, money, and "carbon."

With a little work you get:

    £29.10
        SHF LGE 10:49 11:30  £7.00 Advance
        LGE EMD 11:30 11:34  £2.10 Anytime
        EMD SNF 11:43 14:18 £20.00 Advance

That's easy - the report is complete nonsense, or the individual is misguided at best, or he just wanted a day in Berlin and this was his excuse.

Not sure which of those options I think is most likely.

Regardless whether or not it works out in this case, from working traveling around Europe for the last 8 months and always hoping to use the train, I've found it is crazy how much cheaper flights are.

I just flew from Berlin to Brussels, these are €10 flights one-way. The cheapest train tickets I can see for this start at €89 (from DB). That's a 1h30 flight, or 7 hour train ride.

Yes and no. Factor in getting to the airport, having to be there some hours before your flight, the level of security screening, the unpleasantness of the space you get to sit in on the plane, the inability to work sensibly on a reasonable sized laptop, the spotty wifi, and then being landed miles away from the city centre, I've generally found that train travel compares reasonably well.

Yes, individual journeys need to be assessed on their merits, but once you consider factors other than the list price of the fare, the economics are often not so clear.

I imagine that for many people, having a detour via another European city would be a big plus, rather than a minus. Going to paris, even just to have coffee, when they're leaving London for the weekend would appeal to many people I imagine.

Besides, it's amazing how expensive railways are even if they are slightly more expensive. We're talking 500+ km travel vs 100 km. One would expect a large difference.

> having to be there some hours before your flight, the level of security screening

for inner-european flights those aren't big issues. security is basically walking through a metal detector and you don't really have to wait for hours either.

wifi can be an issue though.

Good luck making that connection at Long Eaton

It's the same train - split tickets.

Your kung fu is better than the kid in the article. How did discover that splitting the trip was cheaper?

Look up the journey from SHF to SNF, look at all the stations the trains call at, download the fares splitting at each station, add the fares. It's about 10 minutes to do by hand, if you did it a lot then you could easily script it.

You can get the train times and fares with a curl on the NRE web site, parse with regex (never do that, but in this case it's a trivial hack - fix it later with your favorite "proper" parser), then look at all the combinations. I imagine Dijkstra would be quick, but it's quick enough just to do a DFS through the combinations.

It's true that you can get a cheaper (but still very expensive by the standards of anywhere else) ticket by booking for the middle of the day and weeks on advance, but if you need to travel at short notice or for a fixture during the day, you can expect daylight robbery for standing room in someone's armpit in a vestibule for 90 minutes.

Option 3 - this was a pure linkbait play for moneysavingexpert.com dreamed up in the marketing department for link acquisition/higher search rankings and PR from "trusted" media sites.

I hated this too, having lived near Sheffield and now live in London.

This was moronic.

Getting to Wakefield is usually cheaper, but still.

megabus.com

Sheffield to Victoria : £11. Victoria to Shenfield : £8.20. (Probably cheaper)

So £19.20

This is no surprise to anyone in the UK. We have the highest fares in Europe[1]. Although you can buy tickets in advance at certain off-peak times for less, it's not always practical or convenient.

The problem is that peak fares can rise to astronomical levels if they are unregulated (i.e. can be freely set by the train operator).

An example: a 2 hour train journey from London to Manchester (approx 200 miles/321 km) one-way booked for a peak-time slot a week in advance can cost as much as £166 (approx €217 / $235), which is frankly ludicrous.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/04/action-for-rail...

When my wife and I were travelling around europe a few years ago we decided to fly back into manchester instead of london, thinking it would be great to catch a game (of anything) and then head back to finish the trip.

Was a complete surprise that we ended up paying about 160 pounds each, and coming from using australian dollars was a complete kick in the face.

Horrible way to end a great trip

(For comparison, an equivalent train trip today in australia would have cost us about 50 pounds for the two of us)

There's a taxi service between Manchester and London, costs £270. It would have been cheaper than the train. Something is seriously wrong.

> An example: a 2 hour train journey from London to Manchester (approx 200 miles/321 km) one-way booked for a peak-time slot a week in advance can cost as much as £166 (approx €217 / $235), which is frankly ludicrous.

If you want a return then it's double, too, unlike many journeys where the return adds 10p to the cost. If there are two of you, it's actually cheaper to get a taxi (quotes from £250-300 each way).

However, one thing to point out is that the £166 price is not an advance fare, that's the anytime ticket. You may have reserved a seat on a particular train but you can travel on any of them (outward journeys on the same day only). Off-peak advance fares go down to about £25 each way.

And this problem (high-speed rail failing to deliver on its promise of sustainable alternative to air travel) is not unique to Britain. Same is happening in mainland Europe too:

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-are...

Discussion thread of above article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920871

One of the big advantages of air travel is that it is much more competitive than train systems. This is due to the high costs of train tracks resulting in a natural monopoly.

Without even the threat of competition there is little incentive to control costs. This often gets magnified by union and government involvement. So despite the theoretical efficiency advantage of trains they are often more expensive than other forms of transport which is a real shame.

Practicality aside,

> £11.83 on a Ryanair flight to Berlin

As someone who's lived only in North America, that is mindblowing.

That's until you understand all the ways they ding you for extra money. Need a boarding pass? ching Have a carry on? ding Have a carry on that doesn't fit the max dimensions perfectly? ding etc...

the closest we have to such fees is Spirit Airlines in the US. They charge more for carry-ons than checked bags (slows boarding).

Allegiant also has several fees that are similar to Ryanair.

https://www.allegiantair.com/popup/optional-services-fees

(I believe they charge for water onboard.)

I've travelled a hundred times with Ryanair and never had any problems or paid a single euro more than the ticket itself (apart for the traditional coffee on board: 3 euro). One of my recent trips was to Canary Islands: 8 hours of flight (in total, counting the return) for 100 euro.

Need to check in at a kiosk because the site is down for overnight maintenance? ding

On the plus side, so long as you don't mind travelling on a bus with wings, laden with boozy nuptial parties, you can get around Europe on a shoestring.

To be fair, you know all that in advance and its not difficult to avoid being charged.

Do airports in Europe not charge landing fees? In the US thats the big source of revenue for an airport.

They do indeed. But Ryanair often flies to secondary airports which offer big rebates on the fees for Ryanair.

Does TIME factor into the cost saving here, both to research and to go so far out of the way? Seems like the savings might not actually be saved, but spent as time, many times over.

they gotta get you to use that bloody plane somehow to get your pnr [0]. after all, s/he might be a terrorist. age doesn't matter as we know [1].

long live schengen. long live free travel. long live the union.

[0] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/de/news-room/20150123BKG1...

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/04/canada-six-year...

With a bike it would be even more faster and cheaper... :-]

100+ miles? Cheaper perhaps but unless he's one hell of a cyclist not faster..

Walking barefoot without resting is clearly the cheapest option.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com