Inside Advice for Your European TripHot tips on good deals and pitfalls of transport and communicationBy Lucy KomisarIf only I had known that the bus to the airport hotel I had chosen ran barely once an hour, while nearby hotels had every 10 or 20-minute service. Or that taking one route from France to Geneva meant paying a 30-euro ($36) car tax. I wish I’d been warned that private cell phone stores charge more for pre-paid deals than do shops run by the phone services themselves. Guidebooks can tell you about the major attractions of a place, but it’s the inside logistical advice that makes the difference between being an astute traveler and a neophyte. Two basic areas you need to know about are transportation and communication. The Raileurope passRail is the best way to see Europe if you’re wandering from place to place. Only for non-residents of the continent, the Raileurope pass allows you to hop on and off trains for one prepaid rate. You can arrange the pass before you leave home, so you don’t have to wait on line to buy one at a train station abroad. If you already have the pass, you or the hotel concierge can make train reservations by phone. To buy the pass, just go to http://www.raileurope.com.
On a recent trip that logged stops in Paris, Luxembourg, Geneva, Lugano, Milan, Rome, and Arcachon, on the west coast of France near Bordeaux, I took over-niters from Paris to Milan and Rome to Arcachon. Take enough night trains, and the railpass accounts for major hotel savings.
Special deal just for France: Raileurope is offering a free 4-day pass for American and Canadian D-Day veterans and D-Day veterans residing in the United States or Canada. The 4-day pass, which remains valid for 6 months after it has been used for the first time, will enable each veteran to travel first class free of charge on the French rail network. Other American and Canadian residents can get a 3-day pass for $199 valid on the French rail network for one month between June 1 and August 31. Americans call 1-888-382-7245; Canadians call 1-800-361-7245 Inside advice: I learned from a flyer given out on the French train that when I booked my ticket, I could have requested a female-only couchette-sleeper. I learned that I should have checked to see if the day-train I boarded in Milan was “reservation only.” It was (look for R in the schedule), and I should have stopped at the ticket counter to pay €11($13) for a seat and save a €9.50 penalty. Paris transportThe train from Charles de Gaulle airport to Paris is fast: 30 minutes. But when I was there in the spring, the kiosks that took credit cards at the airport terminal were all broken and the ticket line took 30-minutes to reach a clerk. It was the same from the Gare du Nord in Paris going back to the airport. If you’re not using a railpass, it’s just as fast to take the bus, which gets to central Paris in an hour. The kiosks at the bus stops always work, so there’s no waiting to buy tickets. For airport bus and train facts and prices:http://www.paris-touristoffice.com/va2/services/transports.html Walking past the Place de la Trinité one day, I was astonished to see the Roissy airport bus discharging and picking up passengers. It’s supposed to park at the rue Scribe near the Place de l’Opéra, about a ten-minute walk to the south. But there was a manif there – short for manifestation, or demonstration -- so the bus had been diverted. You can find out about scheduled traffic-disturbing demonstrations by checking the Paris transit website at http://www.citefutee.com/orienter/manifestations.php. For general traffic jams, there is http://www.citefutee.com/embouteillages/. For Paris transport itineraries and schedules to plot getting from one place to another: http://www.citefutee.com/orienter/itineraire.php Heathrow bus to airport hotelsFlying from New York to Bombay (now called Mumbai), we decided to break the long trip by staying overnight at an airport hotel. We picked Comfort Inn. Touching down at Heathrow at about 8 p.m., we got through customs, picked up luggage and by 9:30 p.m., we were standing at the terminal hotel hoppa bus stop. It would be a long wait, and we wondered, shivering in January chill, where our bus was as bus after bus passed by on the way to other hotels.
Inside advice: Ask the hotel you book how frequently the “hotel hoppa” serves it and which buses meet your plane. Going into London for the night could be faster and cheaper. The airport train to Paddington Station takes just 15 minutes, leaves every 15 minutes, and costs £25 ($44) round trip, but bed and breakfasts near Paddington will be cheaper than airport hotels – and you get a chance, at least briefly, to see London. By the way, the London tube now features a “carnet” of 10 tickets for £15 ($26.65) or a 7-day travel card for £17 ($30.20). A day card costs £5.30 ($9.40), $7.60 if you travel off-peak. Car permit in SwitzerlandThis spring, to avoid having to change rail stations in Paris, we decided to drive from Chantilly, just north of Paris, to Geneva. Switzerland is not part of the borderless European Union, but I’ve driven with friends across the border before, and it was uneventful. Who knew!
We had taken the main autoroutes from Paris, with the last leg on the A40 approaching Geneva from the south. On other occasions, I’d crossed the border at places just north of the city and hadn’t even seen a border guard. So be forewarned or consider an alternate route! If you get a sticker, don’t affix it to the car permanently as it’s good for a year. Río airport to townA friend just back from Río de Janeiro says the long road from the international airport to Río can be dangerous, with local drug gangs from favelas along the way sometimes getting into gun battles with police. Buses have been stopped enroute. A safer alternative is to take the plane to São Paolo, then change to a flight into Río’s domestic airport which is quite close to the city. Cell phonesThis is for Americans whose cell phones don’t operate on the GSM 900 system used in Europe. You don’t have to live without cell phones when you travel, and if you have to make a lot of local calls, there’s a better way than getting an expensive tri-band (900, 1800 and 1900) phone and paying several dollars a minute when calls you make or receive are routed through your home number. On a trip to Switzerland a few years ago, I got a cheap GSM 900 phone and a sim (subscriber identity module) card plus a prepaid card with 60 minutes. A sim is a tiny computer with a memory that stores phone numbers and text messages and allows you to communicate with your mobile provider. Yes, it’s usually called “mobile,” not “cell,” outside the U.S. After the sim was installed, I scraped the card to see the code number, then called from the cell phone and entered the code. I now had an hour’s time. The cost came to about 50 cents a minute, but time was deducted only when I made calls, not when I received them. Prices differ, but you can expect to pay about $100 for a phone, sim card and minutes package. The cheapest Swiss service is provided by Sunrise.
Sim cards generally expire and you lose the numbers if you don’t use them in six months or a year, depending on the company. But you can activate the sim by using the phone in any country that uses the GSM system. Ie, if your French card is about to expire and you are in England, put the French sim in the phone and make a call. Or call the French number from another phone. This way, if you return to France within the new time limit, the sim will be good, you’ll have the same number, and you’ll have to buy only new minutes. The sim in India was just $3, so I let it expire. The others cost as much as $30 or $40. Not only is the local call you make cheaper than if you had to dial from a number set up abroad, but people in country are more comfortable calling you if they don’t have to dial long distance. Inside advice: In London, where Vodaphone is the most popular brand, I bought my sim card for £15 ($26.65) in a multi-brand store. I discovered I’d have saved £5 ($8.90) by walking a few blocks to the Vodaphone shop. And in Paris, when I needed a new sim card, the clerk at the “hole-in-the-wall” shop at the Gard du Nord never told me he had signed me up for 50% voice, 50% text messages. When I too quickly ran out of voice time, I got a refill at another store whose manager discovered the problem and switched me to a full voice plan. Lesson: go to clearly reputable places, preferably run by the service providers. (In France and India, I used Orange, in Brazil TIM, in Morocco Jawal.) Inside advice: The sims are small and easy to lose. Nobody yet makes a carrying case, but a packet that holds 6 or 8 memory cards such as SmartMedia can serve the purpose. Images by Lucy Komisar |
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There are big advantages to the Raileurope pass. Not only do you save on money against plane fares and have the convenience of traveling from city center to city center, but you can save on travel time and hotel bills by taking sleepers. My Paris to Milan couchette cost €36 (then $43). Once I just pushed down the seats in a first-class cabin and stretched out flat in the make-shift bed.
The railpass has graduated from the era when it afforded only consecutive days of travel. Now you can choose a number of days to use any time within a set period, or even limit the pass (for a cheaper price) to 3, 4 or 5 bordering countries. Or you can order one-country passes. For multiple-country prices and deals, go to 
Our bus finally arrived nearly an hour later and deposited us – after making a 20-minute detour to another hotel – at the Comfort Inn. There, we found a schedule and learned that this hotel gets bus service only once an hour, while the Holiday Inns and Radisson Edwardian had transport every 20 minutes, and the Meridien every 12 minutes. Taking a cab that late at night would have cost about $30 while the bus charged $5 a head. If we’d known the schedule, we might have splurged, but no information was posted at the bus stop. At least the return schedule to the airport was at the hotel, so we could plan our morning departure.
As we purred out of the last tunnel, past border police, we were suddenly waved aside. An officer came up, looked at the windshield, and demanded 30 euros ($36)! It turns out that all cars in Switzerland must bear 30-euro tax stickers. Even rented cars from abroad. Even if you’re going to be there for just a day or two and will take the car back across the border. When I protested about paying an exorbitant one-year tax for a two-day stay, the border guard grabbed our passports, pointed to an intersecting road, and said curtly, “That’s the way back to France!”
Then, when I went to France, I simply bought a French sim card and minutes, easily opened the back of the phone and replaced the Swiss sim. I’ve subsequently bought sims in the UK, Brazil, India and Morocco.