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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

As a train loving Dutchman the German bahn.de website is my go-to destination for any travelling from the Netherlands to Germany. It's just so much more convenient than the Dutch NS website.

Fun loophole with those minimum transfer times, was it patched since? It's not something I would use; I don't mind paying a fair price for what is a form of transport much more sustainable than air travel, although I do like to figure out economically frugal routes.

Having to have an argument with a conductor isn't my idea of leisurely travel either. I could manage in Germany, but I once had an Italian train conductor who didn't understand the (valid and very popular) Interrail tickets we had and just got annoyed. She gave up thankfully and move on in a huff.

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> loophole with those minimum transfer times

I have to ask why it’s a loophole. OP consumed just as much train with long stops as someone that travelled directly.

It’s odd, in aviation, you’ll pay less with longer layovers and more for direct, even though direct is the least miles in the air.

I get it that suppliers like to charge more for more convenience but really, the cost of provision is the same (or less!).

> It’s odd, in aviation, you’ll pay less with longer layovers and more for direct, even though direct is the least miles in the air.

What’s odd? Supply and demand. More people want direct flights so they cost more money.

No, that's odd. Supply is not much restricted per route.

There's simply a pricing model where a more convenient or luxurious travel intiniary is more expensive. Only temporary popularity shifts could do a supply/demand price run, otherwise larger airplanes generally lower costs per passenger, and running more flights on the same line is likely a reduced effort and risk than having more lines.

Low-performance or high-variance lines could be higher priced due to having to pay for empty seats (on the same line of flights) but I believe this is not usual. The remaining passengers would be fewer.

I should think air travel would greatly improve with better customer-risk-treatment (e.g. no security - more like busses) and a 'ticketing model' that's as complicated as buying train tickets. Perhaps then we will see some more imaginative forms of air travel.

Airlines actually make it kinda difficult to get longer layovers, and a lot of them have gotten rid of open jaw itineraries. I think the reason that some indirect flights are cheaper is that you're picking up excess capacity on underutilized flights (which, like you said, let's them charge a premium when direct flight seats are scarce)

It's a loophole because they can put a cap on these low early reservation, fixed itinerary prices because of the assumption that only people travelling on a shoe-string budget will do more than six hours of travelling in a single sitting. This keeps the number of travellers who do Norddeich Mole – Zagreb Glavni kolodvor (eighteen hours of train travel) to a minimum — essentially just some students and people on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. A negligible number of people.

Once you start allowing extreme transfer times of 24 hours, you are basically inviting people to exploit that system, which will drive prices up eventually, because those people would otherwise have bought multiple tickets (one for each stage of the journey).

Ns.nl: in English button Bahn.de: English what's that?

Try bahn.com, it is English by default. There is a language selection menu in bahn.de as well.

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