When we decided to travel to Switzerland this year, one of the first things I did was googling up its Big Mac Index.
You know, the tongue-in-cheek measurement of purchasing power developed by The Economist by comparing the prices of Big Macs around the world. As of 2019, a Big Mac meal with large fries and large drink in Switzerland cost CHF 13 (CAD$17.9), 89% more expensive compared with CAD$9.5 in my home country. And I thought Canada was expensive enough for the average traveler.
For readers planning a trip to Switzerland, here are ten proven strategies that helped us keep our budget under control in the most expensive nation we have visited to date.
1. Get MeteoSwiss on your phone. Mountain gondolas are notoriously expensive, and I cannot emphasize how tremendously useful -- and incredibly accurate! -- Swiss weather forecast is for travelers to this mountainous nation. Rainy Tuesday afternoon? Shift your gondola ride to Wednesday morning! With the app displaying precipitation over the next 6 days -- and in 15 minute intervals for the upcoming half-day! -- this is miles ahead of anything I’m used to in North America.
2. Get the SBB app on your phone. After fine-tuning your itinerary according to the weather, the SBB app will be essential for finding your next train, bus, ferry or gondola connection.
3. Install a peak-finding app on your phone. Skip the tour guides -- this GPS-based app will tell you the names and elevation of the gadzillion impressive peaks in front of your phone camera. Remember to pre-download the map data before your trip so that you’re not wasting roaming data.
4. Get a Half Fare Card or Swiss Travel Pass if you’re here for a week or more. Nobody pays full price on those expensive Swiss trains -- you either purchase a Half Fare Card like the locals, or you get a Swiss Travel Pass for your stay. Unfortunately for budget travelers, determining which one to get is a massively time-intensive analysis of tallying up all your train tickets, museum visits and even some mountain gondola rides for the entire trip. So I have developed some quick guidelines listed below:
5. Swiss Travel Pass may be better than the Half Fare Card for you if:
- Your trip in Switzerland lasts for roughly the duration of the Pass: 4, 8 or 15 days at the time of writing. We used a 15-day pass for our 16-day itinerary, paying full fare only on the final train ride to the airport.
- You plan on doing a lot of museums and pleasure boat rides: Ballenberg Open-Air Museum, the castles at Chillon, Gruyères and Bellinzona, UNESCO St. Gallen Abbey, passenger cruises on Lake Geneva and Lake Brienz to name a few. With the Swiss Travel Pass these are all completely free, which turned into CHF 100+ per person savings in our itinerary.
- You plan on visiting at least one of the Swiss Travel Pass’s freebies mountains. Every year the pass offers free access to a few popular mountains which, at the time of writing, included the spectacular Schilthorn for a CHF 41 saving even at Half Fare.
- You may change your plans according to weather. This was my number one reason for picking the Swiss Travel Pass over the Half Fare Card, so that I needed not worry about the cost of extra train trips when I changed my plans (as I often did) at the last minute.
6. Half Fare Card may be better than the Swiss Travel Pass for you if:
- Most of the above advantages of the Swiss Travel Pass don’t apply to you, plus ...
- If you’re spending a lot of time in the Jungfrau region. One sneaky trick of the Swiss Travel Pass is that it offers only a 25% discount on the Jungfraubahn, whereas the Half Fare Card offers the usual 50%. If you’re planning to spend several days hiking above Wengen and Grindelwald (which serve as boundaries of free access for the Swiss Travel Pass), you’ll want to look into the Half Fare Card.
7. When in St Moritz, stay only with a hotel that offers free Mountain Railway access (Bergbahnen Inklusive). The Engadin Valley remains one of the only places in Switzerland that offers no discount for mountain gondolas even if you hold a Swiss Travel Pass or Half Fare Card. But if you stay two or more nights at participating hotels along the valley (which includes Samedan, Pontresina and other cheaper towns outside of St Moritz), those expensive gondola and funicular rides suddenly become free! In our case, we went up and down Diavolezza (CHF 72 per couple), Alp Languard-Muottas Muragl (CHF 70 per couple) and Corviglia (CHF 100 per couple), a combined saving of CHF 242 for booking into a 4-star hotel in Samedan that cost just CHF 311 total for two nights, including taxes.
8. Prep your own meals. Denner and Aldi -- two of Switzerland’s largest discount supermarket chains -- are your friends in addition to the omnipresent Migros and Coop. At the time of writing a typical bratwurst entrée at a typical Swiss restaurant cost around CHF 23. In the same week, bratwursts were on sale at Migros for CHF 5 for five sausages! Whether you’re staying in an apartment or in a hostel, make good use of your kitchen.
9. Pick up local specialties from the family-run butchers and bakeries ahead of your hikes. Fancy those mouth-watering charcuterie platters at the mountain gasthaus in the middle of your hike? You could easily visit your local metzgerei and bäckerei and pick up some mostbröckli and speck, and perhaps some birnbrot, local cheeses and wine for a sumptuous mountain top picnic at a fraction of the price! You could pick up similar items at Migros or Coop, but I always find the small, family-run metzgerei to offer higher quality and often exotic items like deer jerky and wild boar sausages. And remember, cervelat sausages and landjäger jerky can be served without cooking.
10. ALWAYS fill up your bottle at the water fountains. It’s no secret that most Swiss restaurants charge you for tap water -- the same water that comes out of your hotel faucet or a public water fountain. We made the mistake of not filling our bottle prior to one hike, and the little restaurant at the hilltop happily charged these two dying hikers CHF 9 (CAD$12.4) for a 1.5 L bottle of sparkling water. Lesson well learned.
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