After a few years away, we finally returned to the city where we first met: Berlin. We took the train from Chemnitz, excited to spend a few days exploring and seeing how the city has changed.
A few days earlier, we booked our tickets through the Bahn website. We decided to go with 1st class, not because we’re fancy (even though, we always prefer it), but because the price was too good to pass up: 66 euros each for the trip to Berlin, and 66 euros for the return. I even told myself, “Why drive when the train is this cheap?” So I left the car at home.
Total steal, right?
Or so we thought.
Fast forward to today: we’re sitting comfortably at a table in the empty 1st class carriage (rare we saw people to buy 1st class in a regional train here in Chemnitz!), enjoying the peace and quiet. Then comes the ticket inspector. I confidently pull out my iPhone, open the Bahn app, tap on “journey,” “ticket,” and present the QR code. So far, so good.
Then she looks at it and says:
“These aren’t train tickets. These are just ‘Übergang in die 1. Klasse’ tickets. Where are your actual tickets?”
Wait, what?!
We were stunned. We quickly opened our email to double-check the PDFs. And sure enough, they were just upgrades to 1st class, and not actual train tickets! Apparently, we’d unknowingly purchased a first-class upgrade without ever buying a base (2nd class) ticket.
I asked the female conductor how it’s even possible to buy an upgrade without a ticket; what kind of glitch is that?! She admitted it’s a bit odd, but said it can happen when someone already has a physical 2nd class ticket and buys the upgrade online afterward. Which is not what we did.
OMG. What an experience.
Thankfully, she was kind about it. She sold us second-class physical tickets for both directions—because, well, we already had the 1st class upgrades on the app. In total, we paid an extra 210 euros, bringing our grand total to 342 euros, not the 132 euros we originally thought.
So much for the great deal! Dipty had even bragged to her friend about scoring such cheap 1st class tickets from Chemnitz to Berlin. But alas, not on Deutsche Bahn’s watch! 😂
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