Cheap way to travel last minute across France by public transport?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 30 Jul, 2023
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There are three kind of solutions:
- Expensive and fast : train (trainline.fr), plane (airfrance.com, hop.com)
- Fast and cheap : sharing a ride (blablacar.fr), plane (volotea.com, easyjet.com, ryanair.com)
- Slow and cheap : buses (flixbus, megabus, ouibus, isilines, eurolines)
=> You can use goeuro.com to check prices and durations (that site includes carsharing).
Fourth option is to hitchhike ! It’s free and it can be nice ! 😉 (french ppl won’t eat you ^^)
At Busbud, a bus search tool I work for, we did a little study on the price of bus vs blablacar ride sharing in France. It’s in French, hopefully you can get the gist of it: bus is often cheaper but it’s worth checking both options if you’re focused on price.
A third option is to take slow trains (TER) across France. These are not usually as cheap as buses or ride sharing but they’re often cheaper than the TGV last minute. The SNCF doesn’t make it easy to find these connections – they’d rather sell you the TGV. You can find the connections by searching on bahn.de for “Local transport.” You can then book each leg of the trip one by one (in this case Lille-Amiens, Amiens-Paris) at voyages-SNCF.fr or at the station.
looking finding the connection point (in this case Amiens)
There are now a couple tools to compare the prices of train/bus/rideshares. Two examples are Comparabus and kelbillet.
Trying these for a trip in October, 3 months ahead of time, the bus costs from 35 to 50 euros to Bayonne/Hendaye (in my experience, for such distances the price does not vary too much, even a week in advance), the rideshares are available later (booking 1 week in advance is enough, and there are often trips available one day before) and cost around 60 euros (rideshare prices are quite stable) and the train starts at 50 euros (and there are direct night trains between Paris and Hendaye, but they may disappear in 2017).
Overall, if booking early, you might find trips for as low as 35 euros, and in general you can find reasonably priced trips at 50-60 euros, even a day before. Rideshares are getting very popular with the blablacar website in France.
One more thing, France transport network is really centered around Paris. Searching for Lille-Paris and Paris-Hendaye is likely to show cheaper options than Lille-Hendaye (typically, the train between Lille and Paris is one of the most expensive segment in France – while I paid <10 euros last minute in a ride share -, Paris-Hendaye is more competitive – I paid 30 euros by bus, 60 by train a week or two in advance)
I would definitely check Blablacar.fr. There’s always a connection that suits your needs.
Bus will be the cheapest way to get down there.
You will probably have to change bus at some point as close to Hendaye as possible as there doesn’t seem to be a direct bus line to there (AFAIK) from Lille.
Check/Google the various bus services.
A quick search with http://www.eurolines.fr/fr/ returns a 50euro itinerary from Lille to Biarritz.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘