Swiss Tips

Tips & Tricks for living in Bern and Switzerland! These tips are mainly for newcomers and might also be helpful for travelers and locals who might not have heard about a thing or two.
Select a topic below 👇

🚗 Long-distance Traveling

If you want to hitchhike:

🗺️ Hitchhike Spots 📖 Hitchhike Wiki

Ridesharing

You can get a ride on BlaBlaCar for very cheap and you can try BlaBlaCar Daily

🚗 BlaBlaCar 🚙 BlaBlaCar Daily

💡 Flixbus Hack

Traveling via Flixbus is also possible inside of Switzerland. Flixbus is apparently not allowed yet to offer rides inside of Switzerland (Kabotageverbots) so they don't do it but if you buy a ticket to Freiburg in Germany when you're going to Basel from Bern you can just get off in Basel and it's still much cheaper in some cases than paying for the train. The same goes for Zürich if you travel to Lindau in Germany or Bregenz in Austria from Bern or to Bern as cheap as 13.50 you can just get off at Zürich. No guarantee but it seems like when you look for these rides from Bern and then from Basel/Zürich it shows the same arrival time which is a pretty strong indicator, check on the trip tab, it shows all the stops.

You can watch an example video showing how this works:

🎥 Watch example

Free Rides

If you're very lucky you can maybe find a ride for free in these groups to or from Bern:

Other cities, if you want to also try your luck in other similiar groups besides the Bernese one you can look for the "mitfahren" or "mitfahrgelegenheit" here: 🌍 Telegram Sammlung (there is also 1 for all of Switzerland)

🌙 Night Pass (Under 25)

If you are under 25 years old, you can travel around switzerland for one year for 99 francs, always after 7pm. Some gondola lifts and boats are included.

🎫 See on SBB Website

🚲 Inside the City (Bern)

Bikes

You can check at the project house if we have a bike available. You can also try this website to borrow a bike for free

🚴 Pumpipumpe Map

🎁 FAIRTIQ App - 3 CHF Free

You can get 1 free ride (only 3 franks) with public transportation if you register to an app called FAIRTIQ if you use a code from someone else - for example this code MCW8ZTR5S

📱 Android App 📱 iOS App

🗺️ Bus Stop Map

Bus stop map at central station (tap to enlarge):

🅿️ Parking

Park in the blue zone. Parking fees:

✅ 1 hour for free
💰 4 hours: 9 CHF
💰 1 day: 16 CHF
🌙 After 6 PM (until 8 AM the next morning) parking is for free, also for the whole day on Sundays

🎫 Buy parking ticket

For more information, please check this guide: Parking in Bern Guide