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lispm

Hamburg -> Munich. next thursday morning, >600km

ICE, duration 5:40. Cost around 100€ With Bahncard 50: 76 €

Same with slow train: duration 11:00, cheapest ticket 29€

Flight around 200 Euros, Lufthansa 300+€, Flighttime 1:15, Travel time: around 3.5 hours.

Hamburg -> Frankfurt. 400km

IC, duration 3:30, Cost starting at around 75€, with Bahncard 50: 53€

Business Trips: company pays. Many business trips in one year: get a Bahncard 100. Company pays. Costs 4400€. Unlimited travel with full flexibility within Germany. For example one trip Hamburg<->Frankfurt per week and the Bahncard 100 is easily more convenient.

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This matches my experience as well. I take the Thalys from Amsterdam to Paris once or twice a month, and a round trip ticket is around 200 euros.

I don’t think this is expensive at all. Surely the car would be much more expensive (fuel + maintenance), so I do not share the author’s point of view.

I, for one, am incredibly happy for having a viable (much better, actually) alternative to the airplane.

I took the Thalys from Amsterdam to Paris last week for the first time.

Pretty poor design. There's a horizontal section between two windows that prevents you from looking out of the window comfortably, and the whole experience is extremely cramped.

With Eurowings or Ryanair that flight would be 100 €.

Sadly I am yet to know a company that actually gets Bahncard for their employees. I have known a couple that expect people to use Bahncards. though.

> With Eurowings or Ryanair that flight would be 100 €.

No way. Eurowings is more expensive and Ryanair does not fly that route.

> yet to know a company that actually gets Bahncard

That's an easy calculation. It's cheaper once there is a certain amount of travels. But the travel usually has do be on company purpose. Companies then order 'Business Bahncard's for employees, which allows relatively flexible travel.

I know pretty well how Bahncard works, I live in Germany.

The calculation might be easier, but I am yet to know a company that actually offers them to the employees.

While I have been at several companies that require the employees to own such cards, buy the tickets themselves and submit the travel expenses later. So most people end up owning a 25 or 50 one.

As for the flights, those are the prices we pay on average on our weekly flights between our sites and customer locations across Germany. I did not check specifically for Hamburg -> Munich.

https://www.feelgood-at-work.de/workplaces/perk/bahncard/

You'll find that in a bunch of companies. The company I worked for has occasionally even paid Bahncard 100 for some employees. All it took to get any Bahncard for employees was to provide a calculation that it was cheaper than the other options.

If people submit travel expenses, they might also be able to submit the expense for a bahncard.

Any capable controlling department will easily detect that a substantial amount of money can be saved. For a company with 200 employees and 50% of them traveling this might be a six digit figure.

Thanks for the link, that I wasn't aware of.

We offer and pay for BahnCard 50, no questions asked. A single long distance trip a year and it’s paid for. Pretty much every one in the company travels at least once a year. If you travel sufficiently for company purposes, we pay for BC100, for people that travel extremely much, even first class.

Most people that work for us actually prefer train over flight for anything that’s within germany. Travel sometimes takes slightly longer, but is substantially more relaxed and you can actually make something in that time.

I also travel a lot by train, but being substantially more relaxed, depends very much on the connection actually happening, how many people get stuffed into the corridors without having a reservation, if we manage to actually seat on the place that we paid reservation for, if the bar wagon is actually there and with supplies,....

As for the bahncard, nice to know about. As mentioned, so far I know the variant on employee expenses.

The company I previously worked for did pay for a bahn card for me when I was doing the Frankfurt-Bonn route twice a week for a few months

I love taking the IC Bus + ICE from Eindhoven to Stuttgart. Takes me ~6.5 hours door-to-door, for c.a 140-150 euros round trip (with Bahncard 50). I could do this by car in roughly the same time and cost but then I couldn't work (at ca. 300kph no less!).

Flying would be silly too: much less (environmentally) friendly with lines and security checks, which also leaves less time to work. I even have decent internet access the whole time, for free, which I would not have in an airplane.

Another possibility is the FlixBus which takes 13 hours and is €23.

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