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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

I was watching a travel show about France and in Paris it seems tourists can get confused as to where their ticket is for. They can easily end up on a train in an area their ticket isn't for. You get a 100 Euro fine! And that's an honest mistake not trying to get away without buying a ticket.

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Like a lot of rules, enforcement needs to be realistic, appropriate and not overly harsh. In Oslo at least, the obvious tourists tend to get let off with just buying a ticket, even though the ticket app makes it easy to buy the correct ticket. If you speak Norwegian they often look at your travel history to see if you’re a regular payer who just forgot.

100 Euros for a travel story you'll tell years into the future, and funding the tourism economy - win-win!

100 Euros per person. A group of 7 would be 700 and that is only one mishap, there could be multiple per day..

yet another reason not to visit Paris, win-win!

Pretty sure you wouldn't want to make two of those in succession. I mean, last time I had to pay a fine for not having The Correct Blessed Type Of Ticket, I did pay a lot of attention to the tickets I bought next. (Wasn't as expensive as in Paris, but still a palpable mistake.)

"We got fined for getting off the train at the wrong stop" is not much of a travel story though.

> "We got fined for getting off the train at the wrong stop" is not much of a travel story though.

I was on a plane recently and two people in the row behind me were having a lengthy moan about their respective travel experiences / disasters. They stopped escalating when one of them said "That's nothing, we were just coming in to land when the volcano started to erupt."

I was really tempted to stand up and pitch in with a line about landing in Tokyo when Godzilla chose that precise moment to attack, but the fasten-seatbelts sign had just lit up, so I didn't.

Yeah, that kinda sucks.

Last year I bought a friend a ticket from Avon (just south of Paris) to Charles de Gaulle. I rode along and we stopped for lunch in Paris.

He carried on to the airport, met mr. Ticket man, and got a €100 fine for taking the route printed on his ticket, but too slowly.

I can’t understand what they’re trying to incentivise by doing this to tourists.

Transport company gets some money and ticket man gets a share. There is no incentive for them to be human.

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