Switzerland is expensive, and one of the biggest expenses of any Switzerland budget is transportation costs. On top of that, Switzerland has a plethora of train pass options, all at various price points, and covering different things, that there is no one-size-fits-all pass. If you are planning a trip to the country, you’ve probably read that what train pass you get really depends on where you plan to go and how you travel.
I watched a number of YouTube videos about the different passes before I decided on our game plan, but they all basically ended up at the same place: there’s no getting around it; you need to crunch the numbers yourself.
I, of course, relish the chance to create a spreadsheet, so that’s just what I did. In the first column, I wrote down every journey we planned on taking. Not just trains, but buses, ferries, cable cars, gondolas, everything.
Then in the second column, I listed out the approximate full price of each of these journeys (for an adult) by looking them up on the SBB app or through their websites.
The next several columns were then dedicated to the different passes I was considering. Since we were going to be in Switzerland for about two weeks and it would include a lengthy stay in the Jungfrau region, I wanted to compare the Swiss Travel Pass 8 day, Swiss Travel Pass 8 day flex, Swiss Travel Pass 15 day, the Half Fare Card, the Berner-Oberland Pass, and a combination of the Half Fare Card and the Berner-Oberland Pass.
Below each of the passes, I entered the price (per adult) of the pass itself. Then for each journey, I calculated, using the full price as a guide, what the cost would be for each using each of the passes. This meant for the STP 8 day passes I needed to figure out which 8 days made the most sense to use it.
Finally, I added a column at the end to note any extra fees, such as seat reservations, associated with any particular journey, that wouldn’t be affected by the train passes.
Using this, I calculated per adult, the total price of each pass + all planned journeys. They were all fairly close.
When I was doing this, our itinerary looked a little different but what I roughly came up with was as follows:
- Full price: 1098 CHF
- STP 8 day: 892 CHF
- STP 8 day flex: 893 CHF (we didn’t have many non-travel days, so the flex didn’t offer us any benefit)
- STP 15 day: 806 CHF (with 12 travel days in the country, this was a better deal for us than the 8 day passes)
- Half fare card: 761 CHF
- BOP only: 802 CHF
- BOP and half fare card: 780 CHF
Then I factored in any costs for a child traveling with us (most of the passes allow them to travel for free on most journeys), which gave me the totals for all three of us as follows:
- STP 8 day: 2144 CHF
- STP 8 day flex: 2164 CHF
- STP 15 day: 1906 CHF
- Half fare card: 1818 CHF
- BOP only: 1928 CHF
- BOP and half fare card: 1886 CHF
It may appear at this point that the half fare card was the way to go. However, one point that I do not see mentioned enough is that the Swiss Travel Pass also includes entry to a ton of museums throughout the country. The half fare card does not have this benefit. I then calculated up the entry fees to the museums that we planned on visiting (Chateau de Chillon, Fort de Chillon, Chateau de Gruyeres, the Olympic Museum, and the FIFA Museum are all included), which came to about 226 CHF, thus paying for the difference between the STP and half fare card, with the added bonus of just being able to jump on the next available transport and hardly ever having to worry about buying tickets on our entire trip.
So what was our final actual transportation cost? Despite some itinerary changes and one train that I thought was covered by STP but actually wasn’t (surprise!), it was actually pretty close to my estimates. I had calculated around $2400 in USD, and my actual total was $2324, about half of that being the STP itself, and the other big expenses being Jungfraujoch and the train to Germany (which, obviously, wasn’t covered by our pass).