Swiss Travel Pass & Berner Oberland Pass Confusion

Read through the FAQ's at the Berner Oberland website. I believe you can only get the reduced rate if the the Swiss Travel Passes are active over that time period.
https://www.berneseoberlandpass.ch/faq/

Specifically this one.

With a Swiss Travel Flex Pass, do the days have to be activated where you have a Berner Oberland Pass?
Yes. You must activate the days on your Swiss Travel Flex Pass where the Berner Oberland Pass is valid at the reduced price. Otherwise, you will have to buy a Berner Oberland Pass at the full price.

You might think instead, of using a 30-day Half Fare Card costing 120 CHF pp and buying tickets outright until you get to the Berner Oberland and use the BO Pass there, Then you can definitely get the reduced rate.

Going from La Brevine to Zermatt, purchase now Saver Day Passes with the HFC costing 39 CHF pp.. Do the same for Zermatt to Gimmelwald.

The BO Pass will cover you as far as Bern, then continue to Freiburg (Breisgau) with the HFC as far as Basel Badische Bahnhof.

You do know that it takes 2 connecting Post buses to get between La Brevine and Neuchatel

And maybe if any of the various Swiss Passes go on sale this spring, as they have in the past few years, you'll have another dilemma ! Altho each year the passes offered at a discount have been slightly different .
Good luck!

It is never easy. But I believe you are correct that the “reduced fare” option with the BO requires that you use a day on your Swiss Travel Pass, so that will not work with a 4-day Flex Pass.

Take a look at a 4-day BO Pass plus a Half-Fare Card. The BO Pass will be 196 CHF and the HFC 120. You can use the BO pass starting on 6/25 and it will cover a good part of your journey from Zermatt if you take the slightly slower route via Brig instead of the fast route via Visp (which goes through a long deep tunnel so you see nothing of the Alps there). You can see this on the validity map:

https://www.berneseoberlandpass.ch/assets/Uploads/BLS-BO-Pass-M-24-WEB-komprimiert_compressed.pdf

The 4-day BO Pass will take care of most of your lifts (exception for the JUngfrau and Schilthorn) while you are in Gimmelwald. It will not cover the travel day to Bern from Gimmelwald. But with the Half Fafe Card that journey is only 24 CHF. And the HFC, being good for 30 days, will reduce the cost of your travel from Zurich to la Brevine, from there to Zermatt, and from Zermatt to Brig, plus Bern to Basel, all by 50%.

But I will say that the main value of a Berner Oberland Pass comes with the free mountain lift rides. If you do not plan on doing a lot of those, it may not be worth it, and you could just stick with a Flex Pass for your main long journeys. That is what we did with our first 4 trips to Switzerland, because we go to hike, not move around and joyride on the lifts. Or, if your one big goal during your time at Gimmelwald is to take the Jungfraubahn up to the Top of Europe/Jungfraujoch, you might do best with a simple Half Fare Card, which is the pass that give you a full 50% off that pricy trip.

I was writing while Sam posted, and of course he came up with the perfect solution—-Half Fare Card plus Saver Day Passes for your longer travel days.

These replies are all helpful. Traveling through Germany and Austria last summer via train was a lot easier for me to plan so I really appreciate the help.

Swiss trains are very expensive, It is considered a critical public transportation such that there is a train in each direction every hour at a minimum. I took some rides 2 weeks ago where I swear that there were not more than 2 dozen passengers on a 6-car train. But they run and they run on schedule. And the network is the densest in the world.

With a variety of passes and discount cards, it can be a full blown MBA problem to come up with the optimal strategy and still you will spend a ton of money. I took a train from Zurich airport to Zermatt in 3 1/2 hours with a single connection. Some friends were on a charter bus and it took them 6 hours.

The Swiss Travel Pass flex is not very useful. So much that I believe it should be discontinued to make it easier to the tourists. The issue is that most tourists spend some time in the same place, and if you do not activate your pass you do not get any reduction, and thus pay full price on mountain railways etc...

So either get a continuous Swiss Travel Pass, which is very convenient, and gives you reductions on mountain railways, or do as the locals do, and get the Half Fare Card. This can be combined with local passes, but you can also just buy tickets as you go.

Swiss public transit is very good, (but the Belgians actually have the densest network, and the Dutch the highest train frequencies...). It is priced such that occasional use is expensive, but regular use relatively cheap. That is because it does not compete with operating a car, but with owning a car. In the urban areas half of the households do not have a car, and will use public transit for everything. Zurich has as a result maybe a 10th of the car traffic you would expect in a city that size. Almost everyone will have a pass.

And the price is degressive. For example: A Jungfrau Pass for a week costs 282,- One for the whole season (which is what I as a local buy) costs 399,-