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Rail Ninja? RegioJet? Or??

Rail Ninja and RegioJet come up from time to time; most recently in reference to trains from Vienna to Budapest.

Rail Ninja is a train ticket re-seller. RegioJet is a private train company. OBB and MAV are the Austrian and the Hungarian national railway companies.

Just some comparisons. Things do vary a bit depending on the train you select, but in broad terms. Buying anything from Rail Ninja will be the most expensive. Sometimes just a few euro like the example below, sometimes it can be double the cost. On this route the second most expenive is purchasing directly from OBB. The cheapest using a national train company is the Hungarian national company MAV. But the cheapest overall is the private company RegioJet. RegioJet does not always go to the main station in the cities it serves, so check on that as well. In this case, from the train station in Budapest served by RegioJet you still hae a 30 minute trip into town.

October 9; Budapest to Vienna 140 HORTOBÁGY EuroCity / 08:40 / 2:40 travel time / 2nd class
Rail Ninja 60 euro, includes seat reservation.
MAV 29 euro (11310 HUF), add 3 euro for seat reservation.
OBB 52.52 euro, add 3 euro for seat reservation.

RegioJet RJ1032 / 07:58 / 2:37 travel time / 2nd class (closest time to the one used for MAV / OBB
11.90 euro, add 2 euro for seat reservation. Tran goes to the Kelenföld station. Allow 30 more minutes to reach town center.

October 9; Vienna to Budapest 143 TISZA - SZAMOS EuroCity / 10:42 / 2:37 travel time / 2nd class
Rail Ninja 51 euro, includes seat reservation.
MAV 23 euro (8970 HUF), add 3 euro for seat reservation
OBB 52.52 euro, add 3 euro for seat reservation.

RegioJet RJ1032 / 10:27 / 2:31 travel time / 2nd class (closest time to the one used for MAV / OBB
13.90 euro, add 2 euro for seat reservation. Tran departs the Kelenföld station. Allow 30 more minutes to reach the station from the town center.

It always pays to shop around. The other recommendation that comes up often is to use a RailJet train because they will be faster. Not necessarily, or not necessarily that much faster. Just choose the schedule that works best for you at the price that works best for you that has a train that is within a few minutes of the fastest. 4 minutes longer might be worth a 20 euro savings.

Posted by
2004 posts

Seems like a recent post said Rail Ninja sold the O.P. of the post a train ticket for TWICE THE PRICE the train company had set the ticket price at. Mr. E revealed the ripoff.
The $66 ticket had been marked up to $116 if memory serves. A nearly one hundred percent markup by a train ticket reseller who is nothing other than a middleman isn’t predatory pricing— it is piracy.
They should change their company name to “Rail Pirates”. I can even visualize their new logo…

Posted by
20164 posts

Kenko, that was true on one route I was looking at. And when doing the research for this I saw other similar. Also noticed that RailNinja did not list all of the possibilities shown on the OBB and MAV sites. Scam implies something illegal, so I dont use if for them. Poor choice is very appropriate.

Posted by
2488 posts

Rail Ninja are borderline scammers. They set up a lot of websites that on the surface appear to be real railway websites. However they have nothing to do with the railways.

Their websites are intended to trick those that are unfamiliar with European trains. So someone goes to www.obbtrains.com and thinks they are on the real OBB website, however only someone who does not know what an Austrian train looks like would be fooled by that site...

Posted by
7831 posts

I've just been looking for something about the Amtrak Thruway routes and by chance the first thing that came up was a Rail Ninja site for Amtrak.

I hope no one on this forum would fall for that one!

Posted by
2004 posts

Rail Ninja, of course, is very laser focused on pouring back some of its massive profits into advertising that prioritizes its placement at or near the top of the list.
To keep its high profits it know it needs to maintain high visibility so the uninformed get reeled in.