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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

I see it listed at EUR 402/month for 2nd class and EUR 682/month for 1st class or EUR 4,339 and EUR 7,356 annually. https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditi...

It's not cheap, but I have an acquaintance who got a Bahncard 100 with 1st class access because she works at the Bahn and it sounds quite life changing. ICEs on major routes are somewhat frequent and you can just get on the train without reservations or anything. Wanna go from Hamburg to Berlin for the day? You pretty much just walk to the train station and 2-2.5 hours later are in Berlin. You can do stuff on the train. Read a book, watch a movie, start work on your new startup's app or get a currywurst from the restaurant car. I am quite jealous of this.

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It's slightly different, that was not a BahnCard 100. Those are only assigned to people outside Deutsche Bahn.

Deutsche Bahn employees can buy for 1 euro a 24 hours ticket to travel any train in German (ICE included) and bring someone else with them for free. That is the ticket for personal reasons.

If the travel is business related, then you always travel on first class to the destination. Among employees is very common/confortable to travel several times per week betwen locations.

AFAIK employees of high-enough rank do get a card that's equivalent to a BC100, or at least did at some point.

Employees in high salary groups can opt to get a "NetzCard" which allows unlimited travel in all DB operated trains. High management gets a real BahnCard 100 for them and a second person.

The free day tickets for private use that every employee gets are limited to 16 a year (but only one a month is tax free) and don't allow to take someone with you.

By the way, not every employee can use first class for business related travel (many can).

DB are 100 sub-companies under the same brand. I'm getting the impression we are talking about different sub-companies with different rules.

> I see it listed at EUR 402/month

Ah, true, I calculated with the (cheaper) yearly price. It is indeed more expensive if you don't pay the whole 4,339 Euros / year at once.

In theory yes. In practice not so much. There are very often delays for one reason or another. When it works it is indeed super. Usually it doesn't...

The monthly payment option is discontinued, you can now only get it by paying a lump sum of 4339 € for a whole year.

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