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Swiss Rail Pass Evaluation: Extensive Benefits Justify Price

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Swiss PassOur upcoming journey to Switzerland will be our first Europe trip since our first international trip together in 2009 in which buying a rail pass makes sense relative to purchasing individual tickets.  In our last train-intensive trip to Europe (Portugal/Spain 2012), we actually determined that planning ahead and buying tickets directly from the operator lead to greater savings than a rail pass.  This same rule applies to our planned travel in Germany and Austria during this trip, however the comprehensive benefits of the Swiss Rail Pass make it the clear choice for funding our transit within Switzerland.

The Swiss Pass is different from the passes offered by Eurail that are the standard in most countries.  Although Eurail offers regional or global passes that include Switzerland, the Swiss Pass, with its associated benefits, is only available from Swiss Travel System.  Also unlike the Eurail passes, the Swiss Pass offers free fare on local transit options, free admission to many of Switzerland’s best museums and attractions (link to master list), and free rides on many of the mountain cablecars and railroads.  Our first analysis, without considering these benefits, indicated individual tickets would actually be very comparable to a pass at around 305 CHF for our total train travel cost in Switzerland (cost of a 3-day flexi pass, 20 CHF shipping, and one ticket not included on the pass vs. 5 individual rail tickets and Mt. Rigi Majestic Round Trip).

Once we started looking at are other planned activities in Switzerland, however, we began to realize the benefit of the Swiss Pass.  The “flexi pass” we originally evaluated (which does not require the pass days to be consecutive), only offers the benefits on travel days.  Most of our planned activities will not occur on the same days we travel, so to take advantage of the Swiss Pass benefits, we needed to instead evaluate buying a normal 8-day Swiss Pass, which would cover travel and activities for our entire stay in Switzerland.  For a couple, this pass costs 365 CHF per traveler (including the 10% saver discount and 20 CHF total shipping for 2 passes).  Here are the expected benefits we expect to accrue with the pass per person (organized from largest value to smallest):

With this list, we value the Swiss Pass at 437.90 CHF, giving us 73 CHF relative to the individual cost.  Not spectacular savings, but combined with the convenience of avoiding ticket lines, it is a clear choice for us.  We really like how Swiss Travel Systems has put together a product that integrates sightseeing priorities, train travel, and local transit.

For others, its important to do an analysis to understand the value of a pass, and perhaps more importantly, whether a flexi pass or regular pass works best for their situation.  It is possible a multi-country Eurail pass makes more sense, if the sightseeing priorities don’t provide enough savings, and there are also other passes available that give you half price on train travel that may be worth consideration.

Venice in November – Acqua Alta Risk?

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Acqua Alta

We are visiting the end of November, which is at the height of the Acqua Alta (or high water) season.  A last-minute change in our trip plans this year and work schedule conflicts led to us scheduling our Italy trip later than we’d normally go.  Despite the weather risk, we are confident we’ll still have a great trip after doing some research.  Let me explain…

Acqua Alta

Graph created using data from City of Venice

The graph above is scary for a November Venice visitor.  Since 1872, one third of all Acqua Alta events (defined as tides 110 cm above sea level, effectively flooding 14% of the city, and most visibly, St. Mark’s Square) have occurred in the month of November.  Over time, due to subsidence and human modifications to the natural environment, the frequency of events has increased.  In recent history (since 1966), Acqua Alta events occur about 4 times each year.  What the graph and pictures don’t show you, however, is that Acqua Alta events are actually fairly short in duration.  A similar graph to the one above on the City of Venice website shows that Acqua Alta events occur predominately in the morning, between 8am and noon.  The actual time where flooding occurs is driven by the tide cycles.  As seen in the graph below, showing the tide cycles over 3 days, the peaks span at most 4 hours.  So, at worst, an aqua alta event will impact a morning.  It’s also important to remember that the Acqua Alta events are driven by astronomical reasons, not meteorological.  Just because the water is high, doesn’t mean it’s raining.

Venice Tide ChartThe final thing we uncovered in our research that made us comfortable visiting Venice in November is the amount of resources the city invests in preparing for Acqua Alta.  In addition to a dedicated monitoring and warning department, the city also erects elevated platforms along main streets to allow people to walk above the water.  The vaporetto water buses continue to operate and many hotels we looked at provide water boots for guests.

In addition to reading about Acqua Alta, we also took a look at the historic weather trends for late November.  Weatherbase.com is a great resource for pulling weather statistics by date.  For this trip, I built a quick Excel spreadsheet to summarize the temperature trends, chance of precipitation, and chance of “heavy rain”.  For our time period of interest, I obtained the following results:

Avg. Low Avg. High Any Precipitation “Rain”/”Heavy Rain”
40 51 17% 2%

We felt very comfortable with the results.  We can mitigate cold temperatures with warmer clothing, and a 2% chance of heavy precipitation doesn’t seem unreasonable compared to what we’d expect at any place anytime of the year.

After addressing the weather risk, we became extremely excited to visit in the off-season.  Visitors are often turned-off by the extreme crowds in Venice.  We last visited in early September, and although very crowded, we still enjoyed ourselves and found seclusion in the city late at night.  However, in late November, we are expecting solitude even in the daylight hours.  According to statistics from the Veneto Region government used to construct the graph below, November is nearly tied with December and January for the lowest nights spent by tourists in Venice per month.  Relative to when we last visited September, there will be almost as little as a third of the people visiting Venice.  Meanwhile, unlike more rural destinations or seasonal destinations, Venice will be completely open for business in November.  All of the hotel and restaurant options we’ve looked at are open.

Nights Spent in Veneto by Month

We were able to use online resources to effectively address our concerns about weather in Venice in November.  We are looking forward to a very romantic visit and an opportunity to see one of our favorite cities with far fewer crowds.

West End Shows: Discounts, Seats, and Dinner

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Seeing a show in London’s West End was near the top of our list of things to do on our visit.  Originally, we planned on getting tickets from Leicester Square’s Half Price Ticket Booth.  We even started planning our sightseeing itinerary around being able to be near Leicester Square when the booth opened at 9am.  I had a great memory of snagging front row tickets to Les Misérables for half price when visiting in 2003, and wanted to relive the experience with my wife.  Luckily, I did enough research before leaving to know that half-price tickets for Les Mis are no longer easy to come by.

For visitors to London less particular about the show they see, the Half Price booth is a great option.  The booth now posts the list of most of it’s offerings online, including shows available for the next 2 days.  Not all of the shows are “half price”, but decent discounts are sometimes available for even popular shows (tickets to Jersey Boys 33% off at the time of writing this post).  The seats available at Leicester Square are likely less desirable, but many of the theaters in the West End are fairly small with very few bad seats.

If you do buy ahead, however, do some quick research to try and get the best seat possible.  Similar to popular website Seat Guru (used for selecting airline seats), Theatre Monkey provides information on the best seats for many of London’s theaters.  We ultimately decided to buy Les Mis tickets in the Orchestra section and Theatre Monkey was a great resource for choosing our seats.  It’s surprising how different pricing can be for seats that appear to be the same on a map, often due to an obstructed view that may not otherwise be intuitive.  We decided to be close to the action, so we bought tickets for the front row, but avoided the ends of the row since Theatre Monkey identified them as bad seats.  Interestingly, front row seats are often significantly cheaper than seats a few rows back in the Orchestra section, due to the view being less than ideal.  We had absolutely no issues with our view, however, and I believe we enjoyed the show much more than we would have from the Upper Circle and we were able to save a bit of money.

We decided to follow Les Mis with dinner at YO! Sushi (a franchise restaurant in the UK), because of a happy hour on Monday nights discounting all sushi to £2.49 and their 11pm closing time.  We were dismayed to find the restaurant totally empty upon arrival after the show.  We were informed the kitchen was closed and we were relegated to eating whatever was leftover on the sushi belt.  After sampling what was available, we were very disappointed in the quality (on par with supermarket sushi in California) and we cut our losses and quickly left.  Back out on the main streets, we explored for an alternative but didn’t find anything that fit the bill.

Later on in our trip, we realized we just didn’t look hard enough that night, as there are actually plenty of options for late night dining in the West End, including some that actually offer a “Theatre Menu”.  Several nights later we enjoyed one of our best italian meals ever (especially outside Italy), at Bocca Di Lupo, which does offer post-theatre dining.  This restaurant, like many other good ones, is just not on the main streets we explored that night.  With a little research and patience, we learned, it would be possible to enjoy a nice dinner after the theatre.

For a successful West End experience, either book ahead for a specific show or wait until the last minute and choose from the available shows at the half-price ticket booth.  Even though we booked ahead for Les Mis, it is certainly possible to see shows on the West End with much less planning.  Next time, we might try getting half price tickets the same day and use the savings for a fancy post-theatre dinner!

iPhone Offline Map Caching: The Perfect International Travel Companion

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At home, we’ve become reliant on our vehicle navigation systems or smartphones to tell us how to get from one place to another.  It is difficult when traveling abroad to give-up this luxury, especially in places like Europe, where many cities were planned before the advent of the automobile, and directions and addressing isn’t always intuitive.  Paying for a data plan for smartphones is one solution, but it quickly becomes cost prohibitive.  This last trip, however, we discovered a very elegant workaround: if we explored the areas we planned on visiting in the iOS maps application on our hotel wi-fi connection, when we later went out, that map data would be cached and available for our use.  If there was a specific place we planned on going to, we would do a search right before, and “drop a pin” on the location.  Even with cellular data off, the phone’s GPS and compass function, allowing you to see yourself as the “little blue dot” in relation to your destination. Continue reading →

Lisboa Card: Worth the money?

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Lisboa CardSightseeing in Europe can get expensive very quickly.  We try and figure-out where we want to go before leaving for our trip and research potential ways to save money.  Before our most recent trip, we discovered the Lisboa Card, offered by the local tourism office, which includes free admission to many sights, discounts to others, and free access to Lisbon’s fairly extensive transportation network (trains, subways, buses, trolleys).  

Our preliminary calculations before the trip suggested the card would be about a wash, but perhaps pay-out with its convenience (instead of worrying about having money on hand to pay for transportation).  Our prediction was about right.  Here’s how we recouped our €39 72-hour card cost (savings are per person as of September 2012):

Continue reading →