With this ticket you can travel throughout Germany whereever you want (Kiel to Munich if you wish) on one day for 42 Euros and every further person up to 5 persons costs 6 Euros.

http://www.bahn.de/regional/view/regionen/freizeit/quer-durchs-land.shtml

If you are staying within one Bundesland it will be cheaper to take a “Länderticket”, so e.g. you can travel everywhere in Bavaria for 21 Euros on one day.

http://www.bahn.de/regional/view/regionen/freizeit/laendertickets.shtml

And this page here gives you a general overview of saving money with the Bahn(you can select the language at the top of the page):

http://www.bahn.de/p/view/angebot/sparpreis/spartickets.shtml

However I agree with you on the information level. They know exactly what is going on with each train and they can optimize routes to increase the capacity. The German railway system is the core of the European goods transportation system.

Bahn.de is a transportation monopoly. They don’t have real competition on the passenger service and that’s why they are more motivated to improve the service and use better technology to increase capacity and transport *more*. Germans are happy with the status quo because if they don’t move a lot they just use the car and if they move a lot they buy a bahncard 50% (which is super cheap). The only people that suffer the prices are the non-packaged tourists which are a minority, they don’t spend a lot and they don’t have voting rights.

It would be interesting to see statistics to see what’s the percentage of tickets sold at full retail price. My guess is that it is not higher than 30% which means that they can actually reduce the price without losing profit. Railway is NOT an Airline. Being a monopoly as it is, they should use the cargo contracts (highly profitable) to subsidize the passenger service (which should always be running at a loss).

From a tourist perspective it may be as you say but once you understand all the tricks (and you consider the average salary of the country when comparing prices) the system is not so bad.

Regular travelers can get 50% always by getting the bahncard50 membership (230 euros a year). If you plan in advance you can get huge discounts which can be combined with the Bahncard25 membership (57 euros a year). Plus all the special offers (e.g. weekend ticket for groups, night trains…). The key is booking in advance.

The system is not overloaded. I’m always shock about the number of options you have every day between any two cities. And booking is not mandatory, I don’t book 90% of the times and I never have any problem (again the trick is knowing which trains may be potentially full which are also highlighted in the web).

Even if it looks like, I’m not pay by the Deutsche Bahn, but I’m fascinated by their IT system, I have never seen anything like this. Is funny how much money Spain invest in expensive trains while they could dramatically improve the system and boost mobility by just having an information system half as good as the German one.

It seems a little like you are an unmediated stream of consciousness, in some ways that’s good but in other ways bad.

My advice is if you read a webpage, TURN AWAY from the screen and use your brain for a while, you might surprise yourself and form an opinion.