Chapter 2

My first experience with European trains was in 1987, when I bought a Eurail pass on my first trip to Europe. As I recall, it cost $495 for three weeks of unlimited travel on trains in nearly all European countries. Eurail passes are a good bit more expensive now, but probably haven’t kept place with inflation.

However, they now have competition from the budget airlines, such as RyanAir, which has completely changed the flying market. Starting from one aircraft in 1985 and expanding rapidly to 350 Boeing 737s in thirty years, Ryanair showed the industry that you can make more money by reducing fares in exchange for reducing service than by holding fares unreasonably high.

Many people, including myself on some occasions, find fault with some of their practices, but on the whole, my opinion is that they have been good for the market.

To me, the fact that I have to pay for coffee is well balanced by a reduction of hundreds of Euros in the fare, but some want both low fares and all perks, simultaneously.

They spawned a horde of similar operators, such as EasyJet, AirBaltic, GermanWings and SunExpress, providing healthy competition for the established operators, many of whom were government subsidized and had virtual or real monopolies on their routes.

There was a time when I could choose between a $600 fare on Aer Lingus or a $10 fare on RyanAir, but Aer Lingus has seen the writing on the wall and has adopted some of the methods, practices and fare reductions that supported the rise of RyanAir. On any given flight, these days, I may fly Ryan or Aer Lingus, without worrying about being price gouged.

One of the things that RyanAir did to lower costs was to eliminate connecting flights. Another innovation was to price each flight individually, based on demand and length of advance purchase. They also used alternate airports with lower fees and lower congestion. These changes may cause an indirect increase in total travel costs, but overall it is far cheaper to travel in Europe than a similar distance in America.

A reservation service I have begun using is Rome2Rio.com. This is not an endorsement nor a critique, but I will use data from their site to illustrate some points and it seems only fair to give them credit for supplying the data. There may well be other (perhaps even better) resources of which I am ignorant, but quite willing to try, if notified of their URL.

One of the things I like about Rome2Rio is that I can enter any origin and destination I like and they will show me every combination of travel arrangement they can find between the two, with an estimated range of cost and nominal travel time.

Due to the fact that many airlines have adopted the method of pricing tickets based on the precise date, it is important to not use the minimum price shown for tickets on Rome2Rio as representing a cost for your particular trip. One reason for this is that the range is shown before you have entered a date of interest for your trip and travel costs in Europe vary widely, depending on when you wish to go and how far in advance you plan.

There is also the distinct possibility that either there is never a flight on the route in question for the date you actually wish to fly, that flight also may well be sold out.

In addition to allowing the user to enter the city name or airport name for origin and destination, it is also possible to place a pointer at the actual address of both origin and destination. This provides end-to-end cost projections as well as identifying bus line identification, amount of time and distance spent walking and so on.

For example, last month I wanted to travel from Waterford, Ireland, to Agde, France. I entered these cities and selected Search.

Rome2Rio identified 11 possible routes, including combinations of plane, ferry, bus, taxi and private car, with prices ranging from 117 Euros to 755 Euros and travel times of 9 and a half hours to almost 37 hours.

The lowest cost option was also the fastest. It involved taking the train to Dublin, flying to Carcassonne, France, then another train to Agde.

I have an advantage in France of having bought a Senior pass, which gives me a 50% discount, so I favor trains there when they make sense.

In this case, I chose a longer itinerary, taking the bus to Cork and flying to Carcassonne from there. I did this for two reasons. One was to avoid the congestion of the Dublin airport. Another was to add the Cork airport to my list of over 100 airports I have flown in and out of and to acquaint myself with it.

I found that I needed to take the #40 bus to Cork, then the 226A bus to the airport from downtown Cork. The timetables for both buses were shown, helping me to plan the correct timing to put myself at the airport in a timely manner.

Everything went as planned. The Cork airport is an excellent choice. It is larger than expected, clean and does not have the long lines through check-in and security that the main airports have. I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that fares from Cork are comparable to those from Dublin, in contrast to the US, where a small town airport may have fares much higher than in a major city.

We arrived at Carcassonne on time and without incident. The shuttle bus from the airport to the train station was a bit later than hoped for, so my arrival at the train station was too close to the departure of the next train to hope to be able to buy a ticket and board before it left. I bought a ticket on the next train, which was leaving about an hour later.

For whatever reason, this train, which should have arrived in Agde in plenty of time for my next connection, ran very slowly during the trip between the last two stops, depositing me on the platform in Agde, three minutes after the last bus of the day left for my hotel.