Broad Searches and Clear Results

Say I want to visit Bulgaria sometime in August, but my plans are no more specific than that. Skyscanner makes it very easy to find out what would be the fastest and cheapest way to get there. As you can see above, my search need be no more specific than stating an arrival country, a destination country, and a month. (Actually, you can change the destination to “anywhere” and the date to “all year”, so it needn’t even be that specific.) This gives you a list of possible arrival and departure aiports, and eventually a very lucid graph something like the following:

It couldn’t be easier to see when the trip will be least costly. Clicking through will eventually take you to the airline’s website, where you can book flights.

Flight Map

I’m a big fan of maps, as regular readers will know. Skyscanner uses maps to great effect:

This is Skyscanner’s cheap flights map. By clicking on one airport (here, Frankfurt) I am able to see where I can fly to from that airport. Green indicates a direct route, and yellow an indirect route. Clock on a second destination and you can summon up prices and schedules for the route. This is very useful if you want to know at a glance where you can fly to from your local airport.

Multiple Bookings

Another neat feature is Skyscanner’s ability to tell you if the cheapest route between your two cities involves booking two separate flights. For example, if I want to fly from London to L’viv, I might be told that the cheapest way is to book a flight to Venice, and then a second flight from there to L’viv.

Limitations

Firstly, this system seems to work best for routes where flying round trip is equivalent to booking two one-way tickets. I tried a few transatlantic routes and didn’t seem to be able to get deals as good as those you might find on Opodo.

Secondly, you should be wary of the first round of prices the site shows you. As I understand it, these are stored up from previous searches of the same route. As such, they are often a few days out of date and the final price will often be slightly higher. I found the site to be particularly bad at estimating Ryanair prices. Nevertheless, it almost always gives a reliable indicator of which dates will be the cheapest to fly on.

Anybody else notice features and/or limitations of the site that I’ve missed?

The map is probably most useful when viewed on the Google Maps page — follow the above link to reach this. Destinations are colour-coded and numbered according to the typical price of dorm-style accommodation in that town.  Lower numbers and green colours indicate lower prices; higher numbers and orange/red colours indicate higher prices. (The full key is on the Google Maps page.) This map documents all accommodation available for under around £25 per person per night, so all of the places listed here are cheap, by ordinary standards — this is a rating of just how cheap various destinations in Eastern Europe are. All data is taken from hostelworld.com. Below I’ll explain and justify the methodology; in a separate post I’ll analyse the results and talk about how best to use them.

Methodology

The “typical price” for each city was calculated using the following method. Firstly, I took the mean of the cheapest three dorm rooms available in that city. Then I took the mean of the three cheapest dorm rooms in hostels rated above 85% by customers on Hostelworld.com. The “typical price” is the mean of these two means. Some cities only have one or two places offering dorm-style accommodation; in those cases I’ve taken the mean of whatever was available. What’s more, some cities have no dorm-style accommodation at all. Hostelworld lists some guesthouse/B&B/hotel accommodation as well as hostels, so where there were no dorm rooms available I’ve taken the cheapest price for one person in a double room as the ‘typical price’. Cities where this was the case — cities with no dorm rooms — have been marked with an asterisk on the map. Once I had assembled all the ‘typical prices’, I split the cities into ten roughly equal groups, around some arbitrary boundaries, which correspond to the 1-10 ratings you see on the map.

Justifying the Methodology

Why take the mean of three prices from each city with multiple hostels? The alternative is obviously to list the cheapest room in each city. I preferred my approach because some cities have one hostel which is much cheaper than its competition. In those cases, the cheapest price should not be thought of as the “typical” price for that city. Hostels sometimes get full, or are sometimes unattractive for other reasons: a city should not be rated ’1′ on the basis of one very cheap hostel if the nearest competition costs substantially more. Because of this, I thought a mean of the cheapest few hostels was more useful.

Why take a second mean of hostels rating over 85%? It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but many of the better hostels tend to be a little more expensive. And many of us desire some level of comfort as well as rock-bottom prices. As such, I decided that the most useful “typical price” figure would contain not just the cheapest hostels, but also the cheapest very good hostels. A city shouldn’t get a ’1′-rating simply on the basis of a few very cheap but very bad hostels — better hostels should be taken into account, too, when calculating the “typical price”.

Clarifications and Disclaimers

Accommodation is not the only cost of travel, so there are other things to bear in mind when decided where your money will go furthest. But since accommodation is one of the biggest costs of any holiday, it’s useful to know where’s cheapest to sleep.

Quite obviously, prices and exchange rates are subject to quick and unpredictable change. The Hostelling world is very fluid — hostels come into and go out of existence very quickly — so this data will not remain super-accurate for very long. Nevertheless, I think it gives a useful but fallible picture of relative prices across Eastern Europe.

Not all accommodation is listed on Hostelworld.com. This will be especially the case for many guesthouses, campsites, etc, whose prices would be competitive with those listed on the map.

All searches were carried out for a bed in mid-August 2010.

The data spreadsheet used in making the map is here.

Inconvenient

Firstly, if you’ve ever tried to feed a ticket into an automated gate whilst holding a suitcase and a cup of coffee (or any items which require you to use both hands) then you’ll know why I say that gates are inconvenient. Secondly, at some stations there are a very small amount of ticket gates, meaning that one has to queue to exit the station after getting off the train. This is the case at Norwich station. Thirdly, automated gates remove the possibility to “wave someone off” at a station. Finally, the system unfairly penalises innocuous mistakes like leaving your tickets on the train. Since you need a valid ticket to exit the station, if you leave your ticket on the train you would — as I understand it — have to buy a new ticket.

All of these inconveniences would be tolerable if ticket gates served a worthwhile purpose. But as far as I can see, they do not:

Not fit for purpose

Automated gates are supposed to help with revenue protection and increase security at stations. But it’s hard to see how they could contribute towards either goal. The ‘security’ claim is simply ridiculous — couldn’t someone who was set on causing trouble at a station simply buy a ticket? As for revenue protection: while gates may prevent people without tickets from getting on trains, they do not prevent people with the wrong tickets from getting on trains; for example, I might buy a ticket to Burley Park (a station five minutes away from Leeds) but stay on the train until Harrogate, or I might buy a ticket with a railcard discount when I don’t possess a railcard. So even with ticket gates, you still require train conductors to check tickets — when I board a train at Leeds, a station with ticket gates, my ticket is checked within the first ten minutes of the journey. But if conductors are checking tickets, why bother to have inconvenient gates at stations checking them too?

Waste of money

I can’t imagine that those hi-tech devices are cheap. Given the above, couldn’t National Rail be spending its money better elsewhere, by upgrading track or refurbishing trains?

What’s more, I wouldn’t be surprised if automated gates have increased staff costs for stations: each set of gates has several ‘supervisors’ to help when the gates (inevitably) don’t work properly.

Automated ticket gates are an irritating system that our (much more efficient) friends on the continent seem to do without, for the most part. Widely-used systems which require one to ‘validate’ a ticket before boarding a mode of transport, subject to a fine if one is found without a validated ticket, seem much more convenient and cheaper — and not obviously worse in terms of revenue protection.

Are there some major advantages of the system that I’ve missed?

Maps
Google Maps is a fantastic resource, but it still has limitations. For many parts of the world — including some obscure ones — it provides detailed street level maps which are far above and beyond the quality of most guidebook maps. But there are still parts of the world where its maps are sketchy. Bosnia and Albania are two of these places (see e.g. its map of Sarajevo — useful for nothing.) Thankfully there are other resources which can be of assistance. Check out Wikimapia, for instance: this overlays satellite pictures with descriptions of what you can see — helpful for seeing what’s in which part of town. For example, this helped me to find out what no other map or guidebook has told me — that the bus station in Ulcinj, Montenegro, is some way out of town and not very convenient for the accommodation in that town.

Public Transport
There is very rarely centralised public transport information for the more obscure parts of the Balkans. Not all bus companies have websites, not all are in English, and not all publish their timetables on those websites. Scouring the web for scraps of information is often the only way to find out whether there are buses between Mostar and Jajce. I’ve found a couple of useful resources that I wanted to draw attention to, though:

Autobusni Kolodvor: This site indexes some of the many bus lines that run around the Western Balkans. It seems not to be complete; it focuses mainly on international routes. But it’s a start.

Photos of bus schedules in Montenegro: This is a fantastic resource, and the only one I’ve trusted fully. This person has published photos of the bus schedules from a couple of key Montenegrin bus stations. There should be more pages like this — it’s a mystery why the bus stations don’t do this sort of thing themselves. I plan to take some photos like this while I’m away and publish them here, for some of the more obscure towns in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

There are plenty more resources that are useful when planning trips to obscure destinations — many of them can be found in my post on Essential Web Tools for Independent Travellers. I’ll post more as I find them.

This substantially alters the picture of budget Balkan travel that I’ve presented in previous posts, and adds an exciting new set of new options for the budget traveller.

I must admit, I’m a little surprised that Belgrade has received budget flights before Montenegro’s airports. I would have thought Montenegro’s Adriatic coastline would have made it an attractive proposition for seasonal budget flights.

It turns out that there are some other options which don’t involve the overland part. While no budget flights operate from the UK into Bosnia-Hercegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia or Albania, it’s not true that no budget flights at all operate into these countries. Almost all are served by German budget flights from carriers like GermanWings and AirBerlin, and Albanian destinations are served by many budget flights to Italy through carriers like BelleAir.

This gives the budget traveller another option for getting to these countries — pick up a cheap flight to Germany or Italy (or wherever) and then a budget flight onto Kosovo, or Albania, or wherever. Some of the above carriers will sell you tickets from the UK — for example, I recently booked a flight from Stansted to Sarajevo, via Stuttgart, for EUR83 (including taxes and charges).

If you lack the will to explore all these options for yourself, SkyScanner is the site for you. Included in its search results will be “multi ticket” flights which combine, say, a Ryanair flight to Berlin and then a GermanWings flight to Belgrade in the same search result. It’s a very useful tool.

One more point on this — for reasonably-priced flights to Albania, I was surprised to find that British Airways are a major competitor. Their one-way prices match the value of flying via Italy on budget airlines.

But with the new year, my wanderlust has returned, and my mind has been drifting to places afar. As part of this, my desire to update this blog has returned.

Foremost in my travel-mind at the moment is my next serious trip. I’m planning to visit Bosnia and Hercegovina over the Easter vacation. I’m attracted to it as a meeting-point of East and West. Also, I have an appetite for somewhere off the beaten track, and BiH certainly fits that bill. I’m currently thinking about what would be the best entry point, since flights to Sarajevo itself are overpriced compared to some nearby destinations. Options include Zagreb, Budapest and Dubrovnik. I also need to read up on the country and find out what would be worth visiting.

More substantive posts to follow.

I regularly travel from Leeds to Peterborough on National Express East Coast services. NXEC are by far the worst company that I’ve encountered for nuisance announcements. It’s been a couple of months since I travelled this route, and I’ve never made a list of the offending announcements, but as I remember it goes something like this. Before the train has even departed, a lengthy sermon about the trip and the need to have a ticket valid for this precise journey — which often sounds like it’s designed to make travellers feel like petulant children — is repeated twice. Once we get underway from Leeds there are two more announcements — one generic and useless, and the other advertising the catering car. After this, on a normal journey, each stop — and there are up to five between Leeds and P’boro — is accompanied by three announcements. The first alerts passengers to the upcoming halt, and reminds us to “take our personal belongings with us” — surely the most inane of all the reminders. The second, on departure, is another unnecessarily lengthy announcement welcoming passengers to the train. The third again advertises the catering facilities — that is, after every stop, there is a separate announcement advertising the food and drink available on board. It makes a complete mockery of the idea that there is a quiet coach on these trains.

There are a few points worth noticing about this unhappy phenomenon.

– It wasn’t always like this. The frequency and length of announcements has increased dramatically in the five years that I’ve been travelling this route.

– It isn’t like this on every service. The East Midlands Trains services between P’boro and Norwich assault the ears with far less frequency, and some, like the Leeds to Nottingham train, mostly leave their passengers in peace, only making a racket when a station stop is approaching. (I’ve no idea how other mainline services compare — I’ll be travelling Nottingham to London tomorrow, so will listen out.) This makes the claim of rail operators — that their announcements are only in accordance with regulations — seem odd. (If there are “EU regulations” about this, as the Telegraph article says, then I can confirm that nobody has told the Poles or the Hungarians — the trains I took there last month were completely devoid of announcements. What’s more, other trains I’ve taken this year in Austria and Germany have only made announcements about upcoming stations.)

– Much of the information is either superfluous or could be delivered through another medium. This is my main gripe. If we need to be told incessantly that advance tickets must be valid for this exact service, then you should tell us via signs at the station, next to the trains, and at the seats. If we need to be reminded to take our personal belongings with us, then put a visible poster next to the train exit. And for other “information”, why not provide it an on-board pamphlet which is provided to every seat, like many airlines do? Then only one announcement — that passengers should see the magazine for relevant information — would be necessary.

I think that the way to get operators like NXEC to change their practices on announcements is to make a noise back at them.

I’d be interested to hear how the NXEC stories compare to other rail operators.

Prizren, Kosovo: A mixture of Kosovan and Albanian paraphernalia on sale, showing a strong Albanian identity among Kosovars. Note also the US flag -- America is popular in Kosovo.

Firstly, and importantly:  you can only really make the Kiev-Krakow journey on the daily 20-hour train. Bahn.de will tell you that there are faster connections — notably the 13-hour journey with a half-hour lay-over in L’viv. I had planned to take this option, but the ticket office at Kiev would not sell me tickets for it. Apparently Ukrainian trains are not reliable enough to allow for 30-minute layovers. Given this, I think the best way to make the journey would be to spend a day or two in L’viv rather than going straight from Kiev to Krakow (or vice versa) — I would have done this had I had more time.

Secondly: costs. I was sold a ticket for 850 UAH (about 68 EUR) which was more than I expected, considering that the Budapest-Warsaw overnight train cost just 39 EUR. This got me a bed in the Polish carriage, in a pleasant compartment built for three (though, happily, I had the compartment to myself). There were Ukrainian carriages attached to the train too; I suspect they might have been cheaper. I’m confident that it would work out cheaper to do the trip in two legs; i.e. Kiev to L’viv and then L’viv to Krakow.

One reason why the trip takes so long is that Ukraine’s rail lines have a different gauge to those in Central Europe; so, on the Polish border at Przemyśl, each carriage going on into Poland has to be given different wheels. This is a time-consuming process. Thankfully, you can get off the train whilst it’s going on, and this gives you some time to explore Przemyśl, which is a pleasant provincial Polish town.

The border crossing itself is completely painless, if rather slow. You stop on the Ukrainian side and customs officials and passport-checkers board the train, disappear with everyone’s passports, and return a few minutes later (a process that will be familiar to anyone travelling by bus in non-Schengen Europe). I had expected the entry to Poland to be a little stricter, since it’s the outer border of the Schengen area, but there were no problems. Nobody went through my luggage, or anything like that.

Finally, safety and security: I found the trip to be completely safe and secure; not at all like overnight rail journeys in Eastern Europe are reputed to be (mostly, I suspect, as a communist throwback). Part of this is because I had a cabin to myself; but unless I had been sharing with a thief or a murderer, I don’t see how there could have been any problems.

To reiterate what I said earlier — I think this trip would be best done in two legs, if you have the time. But it’s absolutely do-able if you’re willing to put up with the incredible amount of time that it takes.