Travel around Switzerland

Hello everyone. I want to share my experience of traveling around Switzerland. There are many reviews and trip reports online, but I could not find a well-structured guide from start to finish. Here I will try to explain in a clear way how to see the best parts of this wonderful country as efficiently as possible. I should note right away that this kind of vacation is not cheap, but in Switzerland you can get a huge number of impressions in a short time. Traveling around Switzerland is very easy thanks to its brilliantly designed railway network and the special ticketing system built around it. Of course, you can rent a car or come in your own, but that will be expensive, difficult and uncomfortable.

Getting a visa

So, to enter Switzerland you need a Schengen visa. There are several visa types. For tourists, either a standard tourist visa or a visitor visa for seeing friends or relatives will work, if you have such contacts there.

In Moscow, a Schengen visa for Switzerland can be obtained in two places: either at the Swiss embassy or at its accredited visa center. Customer service is organized better at the visa center: they accept documents during a wider time window, although unfortunately they are closed on weekends, just like the embassy, and you can arrange return delivery of your passport by Fox Express courier service. Delivery of one visa to my town outside Moscow, about 120 km from the city, cost me 500 rubles. But in addition to the visa fee, the visa center also charges a service fee; in March 2013 it was around 1000 rubles.

Here is the link to the visa center website, where you can make an appointment either with them or with the embassy: http://www.vfsglobal.com/switzerland/russia/contactus.html. You can also hand over the whole process to travel agencies, but that will most likely be much more expensive than doing it yourself.

Choosing a base city for the whole trip

Decide where you are going to stay in Switzerland. We, for example, stayed in Geneva, but that is not the cheapest or most convenient city for traveling around the country because it is located on the far western side. I would recommend staying in Interlaken, which is in the center of the country. From there you can reach almost any part of Switzerland in a reasonable amount of time, and it is also a very beautiful town. For hotel booking I use http://www.booking.com/. Read the hotel details carefully, check guest reviews and pay attention to check-in times. You may fail to arrive by the stated time, and then your room could be given to someone else. One more nuance: some hotels reserve, block or charge money from your card in advance, usually the cost of the first night. After your stay, the hotel may incorrectly release previously blocked funds, and in that case they can remain blocked for up to two months.

Flights

Next you need to buy a plane ticket. If you are flying from Moscow, there are many options. For searching flights I use http://www.flytourist.ru/. In 2012 I flew Aeroflot from Sheremetyevo, and in 2013 I flew SwissAir from Domodedovo. SwissAir turned out cheaper for the Moscow-Geneva round trip: 22,600 rubles for two tickets versus 30,000-32,000 with Aeroflot. But of course it depends on when you fly and when you buy. For some reason Aeroflot dropped its fare to 26,000 rubles a week before departure.

Things you should take with you

My standard packing list for a trip:

• Passport.
• Money: cash in rubles and foreign currency, plus bank cards.
• Mobile devices: smartphone plus a regular phone, tablet, netbook, camera and chargers.
• Clothes. Even in warm months, if you plan to go up into the mountains, bring something warmer.
• A shoehorn, because hotels usually do not have one.
• A 220 V power splitter/adapter. Hotels may not have enough sockets. Swiss sockets are similar to ours, but they also have an extra hole for grounding.
• Sunscreen. It is especially useful high in the mountains, where the sun is strongest and you can burn much faster.

Internet and mobile connection

For a proper trip you really need to have internet with you all the time. I studied the roaming and data plans available from local operators in the Moscow region as well as Swiss ones. Here is a short overview:

"Bit za granitsei" from MTS

The terms were 150 rubles for 10 megabytes per day, after which the speed was cut to a painfully slow 16 Kbit, enough only for something like ICQ, while loading websites became difficult. I used this plan in 2012. In 2013 it became more expensive for Switzerland, 300 rubles per day, so I dropped it in favor of MegaFon's "Vacation Online". There everything is billed per megabyte, similar to local mobile internet in the Moscow region: 7 rubles per megabyte. But there is one catch: you need to save in advance the list of partner mobile operators you should connect to, otherwise the billing can be more expensive. In Switzerland I connected to Swisscom. Still, I used this tariff mostly in situations where I could not use the local SIM card called Lebara.

Lebara from Sunrise

After buying the SIM card you can activate a service called Data Flat. It is an unlimited monthly option with 1 GB of high-speed traffic included; after that the speed is reduced to 16-64 Kbit per second. The first activation is free if you bought the SIM card and have 15 Swiss francs on the balance. If you want to activate it a second time, it costs 15 Swiss francs.

You can read about this SIM card here: http://www.lebara.ch/data-flat.

And on this page, at the bottom, there is a list of supermarkets where you can buy it: https://www.lebara.ch/gratis-sim.

Internet in cafes

If you hope to find Wi-Fi somewhere in a cafe, in Switzerland that can be tricky. During authorization they often ask for a phone number, then send an SMS with a code, and only after entering that code can you use the internet. On top of that, the instructions are usually not in Russian or English. In France or Italy I could connect to McDonald's Wi-Fi quickly and without problems.

Mobile communication

"Zero Without Borders" from MTS

To receive calls on my MTS number, I enabled the "Zero Without Borders" option. It is convenient: for 25 rubles per day you can receive calls almost for free. The money for this service starts being charged only after 10 minutes of conversation, but even then the caller can just hang up on the tenth minute and call again. There is a limit though: no more than 200 such free incoming minutes per calendar month. By the way, this option can also be activated with bonus points, 750 bonus points for 10 days.

"Seductive Roaming" from Beeline

The subscription fee is 10 rubles per day, and all incoming calls, outgoing calls and SMS cost 3.95 rubles.

Offline maps

For a trip like this you will most likely need offline maps on some mobile device. I recommend the Rmaps app for Android. Here is how I do it: before the trip I build a plan of the places I want to visit, download the required areas from google.maps into the cache of SASPlanet, export those areas into the format understood by Rmaps, and that is it. Now you have offline maps with the level of detail you need. The downside is that you cannot search for objects on such maps. But if you build the route in advance, you do not need search. You can read how to create maps with SASPlanet and Rmaps here.

Mobile apps

SBB

During a trip around Switzerland, the Swiss railway app "SBB Mobile" will be invaluable. It can be downloaded for free from Google Play. The same functionality is also available on the website. It is simple: specify the departure station in `from`, the destination station in `to`, the date and the departure time, and you will get a list of possible routes. The routing is very accurate and can include transfers. By the way, this service can build routes not only from one railway station to another, but also across buses, ships and even walking segments. To choose the start and end points properly, you need a highly detailed map such as google.maps with visible stop names. The Android app also keeps query history so you can repeat a route, and it lets you save favorites.

If the train you are currently riding starts running late, you can track that in real time in this app by simply refreshing your route. Also, if the train driver suddenly announces something over the loudspeaker in a language you do not understand, update the route in the app and you will see what is changing.

EasyJet

If you are staying in a large Swiss city with an airport, you can cheaply fly to nearby countries with EasyJet, but the tickets should be bought in advance because they are cheaper then. The closer to departure, the higher the price. For booking tickets or checking schedules there is a convenient Android app.

Rail pass

To reduce your travel costs in Switzerland, you will most likely want to buy a SwissPass (here is a detailed coverage map). It is a travel pass for trains, buses and some other forms of transport. In some places it gives discounts, for example on cable cars, and quite often tickets are sold at half price. It also gives free or half-price access to some museums. It is expensive, but buying separate train tickets every day would cost even more. Over the course of a trip, you can get value equal to around ten SwissPass prices if you travel somewhere every day. These passes can be bought at any major station, at SBB kiosks, and in large supermarkets.

One important thing to know: if you travel with a SwissPass, you do not have reserved seats by default, so you have lower priority than someone who reserved a seat. Usually such seats are marked with a card near the seat number showing between which stations the seat is reserved.

Weather

Install some kind of weather-tracking app, because if you plan to travel around all of Switzerland, you can often escape bad weather by moving to another part of the country. For example, when the weather worsened in Geneva, we went to Lugano and Bellinzona, where the rain could not reach because of the high mountains, and the weather there was excellent. I wrote a small service for myself that parses weather websites and shows a list of cities to visit sorted by predicted daytime temperature. You can also use this service to understand which forecast website is better for the city you are planning to visit.

Currency

In Switzerland both Swiss francs and euros are accepted, but the price in euros is usually calculated with an unfavorable exchange rate, so it is better to pay either in francs or with a ruble bank card. If you pay with a euro or dollar card, you can lose quite a lot because of cross rates.

That is the end of my story. Ask your questions in the comments, and I wish you a good and well-planned trip around Switzerland. In the next articles I will describe some of the journeys that I liked the most. Here is a small list of what I want to cover:

• Mount Pilatus.
• Hammetschwand Lift.
• Mount Stanserhorn.
• Montreux, Lausanne, Vevey and a lake cruise.
• Journey from Geneva to Interlaken (Thun, Brienz) by GoldenPass, plus a lake cruise.
• Glacier Express.
• Journey to Gornergrat, from where you get a beautiful view of Matterhorn.
• Locarno, Bellinzona and Lavertezzo.
• Chamonix and Mont Blanc.