Cheap Tricks and Subway Insights

I'm trying to get caught up on some of the posts, and in doing so I'm probably cutting corners with grammar, spelling, etc. I'll try to clean this up later, but if not, forgive me, I'll blame it on jet lag and other related travel issues!! Also, this entry is a bit out of order since I wrote it four or five days ago, when in Munich, but I'll go ahead and publish it anyway.

It goes without saying that thanks to the current weakness of the dollar, almost any destination in the world is expensive for Americans, and Germany certainly falls into that category. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts on where to save a euro or two.

Food is one of the few discretionary items in your travel budget, and you can save a great deal here if you savor the expensive meals but try to eat as a local the rest of the time. Hotel restaurants are notorious for gouging, and even more duplicitous is the "breakfast buffet" so many of them tout. Many guests assume that the buffet is included in the basic room charge, but that is not always the case, and many hotels will be glad to let you believe the breakfast is free, until you check out and find that it cost you $25 or so each morning. As much as I liked my Munich hotel (K+K Munich), they are guilty of this practice, and I heard a family of five check out yesterday, lamenting the $400 they did not believe they owed for what they felt was an included meal. Be careful, if in doubt ask, and ask specifically what is free: The Strand Palace, a hotel I love in London (more later) does offer and even tell you about the free continental breakfast buffet they offer each morning. What they don't tell you, however, is that the continental breakfast does not include any of the hot items they intermingle with the buffet, so if you snag a piece of bacon or some scrambled eggs, you've broached the freebie line and opted in to the price of the full English breakfast. The English breakfast is not free, but rather your room charge will be about $25, even if you just took a breakfast sausage or two. Again, ask if breakfast is free, and if the answer is "yes" make sure they tell you what is and is not complimentary in that breakfast room.

When you do want to eat like a local, one of the best places to do so is in the sandwich kiosks that are in virtually all of the city subway stations. The food is cheap, good, and fresh since everything is cleared out each night.

Another "gimick" which seems to be catching on is selling mobile phones you cannot or do not want to use. Many tourists are wise to the idea of buying a cheap, prepaid mobile phone and using it overseas rather than paying the obscene rates that most hotels charge you to place even a local call. If (and this is a big if) you do your homework, buying a cell phone can be a real convenience and cost-saver. When I went to Italy about three years back, I researched the subject, bought a phone and prepaid service for about $100 before I left the US, and it worked perfectly: I could call back to America for next to nothing, and people who called me cost me absolutely nothing (literally...free incoming calls). Yesterday, even though I didn't really need it, I went into a T-Mobile store and picked up a basic phone for less than $50, figuring I would have the same success that I did with the Italian phone. Unfortunately, since I did this on the fly, I didn't research it, and I found out that calling back to the US was about $3 per minute!! Fortunately, since it was a prepaid phone, I only "lost" the money on the card, but had it been backed up by a credit card I would have spent a few hundred before I even knew what happened. Beyond that, there is the question of locked versus unlocked phones, an important topic if you want to use the phone anyplace other than in the country in which you bought it. I'm not going to go into details, as you can find much better info elsewhere on the web, so let me just say that buying a prepaid cell phone can be a real bargain, but you need to do your homework first and not just pick one up on the fly.

As for the subtleties of the subway, I finally caught on to Munich's system. As I mentioned previously, the subway system itself is fantastic: Clean, efficient, easy to navigate. The hard part, however, is figuring out the fare system. Again, since this trip was a spur of the moment thing for me, I was not able to research the way I normally do, so the system is probably not much more complicated than most, but it just seems that way to me. As for the tickets, there are four general types of passes you can buy to navigate the 16 zones in the Munich system:

1. Inner four zones 1-4
2. Expanded eight zones 1-8
3. Outer zones 5-16
4. The whole enchilada, zones 1-16

The key here is to figure out how far you will travel then buy for those zones. Though there are multi-day passes, I don't recommend you buy anything other than the single day pass, since you may not know from day-to-day how far you will travel. You can also buy companion passes which are good for groups such as families.

The S-Bahn, U-Bahn, bus and tram systems all use the same ticket, so it really is an incredible bargain. Don't do as I did and spend 30 minutes looking for a ticketing machine for one of the "other" systems; it's one big, happy family, and the only time you need to buy someplace else is when you choose to hop on one of the cross-country trains such as "Die Bahn," i.e., DB.

Once you buy the ticket, you need to validate it before boarding the train; if you don't do so and you are "caught" with an unvalidated ticket, it is in essence the same as not having a ticket at all and you pay a 40 euro fine on the spot. You validate using small breadbox-sized machines which will stamp the time and date on the ticket, in essence starting the clock for it so that you (and the transportation people) know when your ticket expires. Many other countries (e.g., Italy) use almost exactly the same type of system, so learning it in one place will help you in others.