The Deutschland-Ticket tourist trap

Visit mo.pla here: https://en.mopla.solutions/en/tickets/deutschlandticket (this is not an endorsement or an affiliate link).

In Germany, one ticket costing €49 a month gives you unlimited travel on local public transport anywhere in the country. So obviously it’s attractive to tourists… but there’s a catch.

In this video, I explain what the catch is, and a suggestion on how not to fall into the trap.

Chapters:
00:00 One ticket, all destinations
00:41 The traditional system
01:31 The D-Ticket: a solution
02:11 Not designed for tourists
02:39 It’s a trap!
03:30 How to work around it
04:49 Looking to the future

Music:
“Hot Swing”
by Kevin MacLeod https://incompetech.com/
Creative Commons Attribution licence

———

Send letters and postcards to:

Rewboss
Postfach 10 06 29
63704 Aschaffenburg
Germany

Please don’t send parcels or packages, or anything that has to be signed for.

I have a Deutschland-Ticket, which means that,
without needing to pay any extra, I can use public transport to get from
my home to, for example, Frankfurt. And now that I’m in for example Frankfurt, I can go anywhere I want on local public transport, whether it’s bus, tram, U-Bahn or S-Bahn. Or if I decide that Frankfurt
isn’t for me after all, I can hop on a regional train
and go somewhere else, like Marburg or Heidelberg or Koblenz. In fact, I can go anywhere in Germany — which is how it was that some of you saw me
riding the trams in Bremen a couple of months ago. So here’s how this works. Normally, local public
transport tickets are issued by local public transport
associations and operators. If you’re in Berlin, local public
transport is organized by the VBB; if you’re in Cologne, it’s the VRS; and if you’re in Frankfurt, it’s the RMV. On the face of it, it makes sense that
local infrastructure is administered locally. But because each region has its own rules, the ticketing systems don’t
work the same everywhere. It gets even more complicated when you have to
cross a boundary into some other area. For example, where I live is just about
within commuting distance of Frankfurt, but that’s in a different region. There is an agreement in place
between the two transport associations that will allow you to buy
a special “transitional” ticket — but that’s expensive. The Deutschland-Ticket makes life a lot easier: one ticket is valid for all forms of
local public transport everywhere in Germany. No matter where you are,
you can just hop on public transport — and yes, that includes
the Wuppertal suspended railway. You can also use any of these types of train, and even a handful of long-distance trains —
although not most of them. The big advantage of this ticket, of course, is that if you’re travelling around Germany, you don’t have to learn a completely new
tariff system in every city that you visit. So it seems like it would be
the perfect deal for tourists. But is it? Well, it can be. That depends on a couple of factors, but what you have to bear in mind is that
it’s not actually for short-term visitors: it’s intended for long-term residents. It is a subscription-based digital ticket that auto-renews every calendar month
until you cancel it. And this is the trap that I’ve seen
a lot of tourists fall into, because the cancellation terms
are not always tourist-friendly. The Deutschland-Ticket is offered for sale
by many different resellers, most of them transport associations and operators. And most of them have the kind of cancellation
policy that Germans find pretty normal, but which everybody else finds very confusing. If you want your subscription to
end at the end of the month, you have to cancel at the latest by the 10th day. If you miss that deadline, your subscription
will auto-renew for another month. I’ve seen people who didn’t understand the terms
being made to pay twice what they expected. In some cases, this can lead to people being
sent demands and threats of legal action. It may feel like a scam, but these terms are
clearly laid out, and quite normal; and a court is not likely
to take your side on this. Now, obviously the problem with this ticket
is that it’s not designed with tourists in mind, but tourists were inevitably going
to want to take advantage of it. Now, one solution would be to have
a version of this ticket for tourists to use, perhaps one that’s valid only
for a week or two weeks. But I think there’s probably a simpler solution, and I’m going to phrase this as a question. Why, in this day and age, does it take
three weeks to process a cancellation? And it’s a fair question,
because it doesn’t have to be that way. And I know that, because it isn’t always that way. Now, I have not tried this out myself,
and I have not been paid to endorse this. But there is a company called “mo.pla”, that offers the Deutschland-Ticket
under much more favourable terms. It has two interesting options. You can choose to “pause” the ticket temporarily, so that you don’t have to pay for months
that you don’t actually use it; and you can cancel it completely as late
as 24 hours before the end of the month. So if this little start-up can manage it, why can’t a far bigger company like Deutsche Bahn with its annual turnover
of 40 or 50 billion euros? I think it is fair to point out that
the Deutschland-Ticket is still relatively new, and still being evaluated. My hope is that it represents the first step
towards a comprehensive reform of the way public transport in Germany
is organized and financed. But that might prove to be quite difficult: any attempt by the federal government to take on
responsibilities delegated to the states is always fiercely resisted. But I can make one prediction. The Deutschland-Ticket has resulted
in operators losing revenue, and some of them have been
getting into financial difficulties. So expect the price to go up
in the near future.