Ending our River cruise in Basel. Going from Basel to Wengen and then on to Luzern 2 days later. Flying out of Zurich. We will be using the rails to travel throughout our time in Switzerland. Is there any easy way to decide if we need a half fare card? Or should we just purchase the average passes for each destination? Thanks for all of your help in advance
Posted by
Washington DC
28062 posts
It might be useful to know your dates of travel.
Posted by
Nashville, TN
612 posts
It's hard for me to tell from your post exactly how long you'll be in Switzerland, but very likely you'd come out ahead with the Half Fare card. Train travel in Switzerland is fairly expensive and usually within a few days you end up breaking even, especially for mountain trips around Wengen.
If you want to calculate for sure, go to SBB.ch and type in each of your trip legs (I.e. Basel > Wengen, Wengen > Mannlichen, Wengen > Jungfraujoch, Wengen > Luzern, etc. as examples) -- SBB defaults to HFC pricing, so double the price you see to get the full fare. For example, the train from Basel to Wengen is somewhere around 80 chf per person. With the HFC you'll save 40 chf just on that train alone. The HFC is 120 chf, so you only need to do 240 chf worth of transportation to break even, which my guess is that you'll do.
Posted by
OP
Utah
25 posts
We will be traveling May 30 ending on June 4.
Thanks for the replies so far. I will look into the half fare card for the train.
Posted by
182 posts
I do a spread sheet with Point2Point ticket price/HalfFareCard/ and Swisspass prices for each trip to Switzerland.
The Half Fare Card usually wins, but if you favor flexibility, and not having to buy your tickets for each trip, then the more expensive Swiss Pass could be worth it (available in a number of day/duration choices) for its HOHO feature.