After the great success of Germany’s program where tourists could buy tickets within the country for a fixed price of €9, Germany’s regions have now agreed on plans to introduce a new €49 travel ticket that will be valid on both public and regional transport across the country. Interregional tolls will be introduced by January 1, 2023. Details below.
This has never happened in the history of public transport in Germany: at the beginning of summer, the authorities decided to massively support the tourism sector, public transport, and tourists – for this they allocated unprecedented sums. In the fall, the program changed but remained profitable for tourists.
According to the data, the new tickets will be available in the format of a monthly subscription. Other details have not yet been announced by the authorities. According to I Am Expat, state transport ministers have announced that tickets will be sold digitally – essentially a travel pass that anyone can buy. You can cancel your subscription at any time.
According to Volker Wissing, who is transport minister in the federal government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the new program will “remove bottlenecks” in the system, as the tickets can be used outside the regions. Moreover, he emphasized that the new pass will be as easy to use as the €9 ticket. In other words, tourists will be able to move in all directions and make any number of transfers.
Although the country has decided to switch to the new scheme, authorities have not given a start date as the country still needs to resolve pressing financial issues. However, it is already known that Germany is ready to allocate 1.5 billion euros from the budget for this scheme, provided that the regions contribute a similar amount.
Before plans for the new scheme were agreed upon, the government said it planned to introduce inter-regional fares by 1 January 2023. In addition, the same message stated that the ticket would initially be valid for two years.
The successor to the €9 ticket program is expected to be as successful as the last one. We will remind you that the season ticket, when you could buy a monthly pass for only 9 euros in Germany, expired on August 30. Summarizing the results, Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) reported that the number of tourists who chose to travel by rail during the scheme had increased significantly and exceeded the level of the previous year in 2019. Conclusions are expected: locals and tourists appreciated the program. For comparison: passengers paid 57 euros for the cheapest summer ticket in the Bavarian capital Munich, and 112.80 euros for the most expensive one in Hamburg. In other words, a three-month pass cost them less than a monthly pass that operated outside the program.
Destatis showed that rail travel increased, particularly in rural areas with high levels of tourism. Rail journeys of 30 kilometers or more have exceeded pre-pandemic levels. In July 2022 alone, an average of 42% more trips were made by rail than in the same month of 2019.
In addition to the above, during the summer months during which the scheme was active, the country also recorded a large number of nights spent by tourists, that is, they were not satisfied with day trips but stayed overnight in one or another hotel in the German region.