July 10th - Just how affordable is Switzerland?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ahead of the key England v Wales match in the Women's Euros in St Gallen, Switzerland, I have been assessing the cost of being a tourist in the Alpine nation. For more advice, I am talking to Alex Herrmann, director United Kingdom & Ireland for Switzerland Tourism – about Big Macs and much else.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Thursday the 10th of July. |
| 0:06.3 | Three days before that crunch Euro's 2025 match between the women of England and the women of Wales |
| 0:14.3 | being played, of course, in Switzerland, the host nation. Ahead of the tournament, I did some research. |
| 0:21.8 | I looked at prices in the UK and tried to compare them with prices in Switzerland. |
| 0:27.7 | My conclusion was that generally Switzerland was probably about 20% more expensive than the UK. |
| 0:36.4 | I got a very kind response from my guest today. Alex Herman, he is the |
| 0:41.7 | director UK and Ireland for Switzerland tourism and I thought it would be a good idea to come and talk |
| 0:48.2 | to him about prices in Switzerland. Alex, very good to see you. I'm going to begin by saying the first time I went to |
| 1:00.4 | Switzerland, which was probably before you were born, I remember getting three Swiss francs to a |
| 1:06.2 | pound. Now I'm getting barely one Swiss franc for a pound. It's not a country I feel wealthy in. |
| 1:13.5 | First of all, thank you so much for having me, Simon, and thank you for immediately reacting to my little note. |
| 1:21.1 | Or of course, the exchange rate is only one way to look at it. You have different levels of inflation and that the whole macroeconomic environment has to be |
| 1:29.0 | taken into account as well. But it's absolutely clear, Switzerland is not a cheap destination. |
| 1:35.4 | Switzerland will never be a cheap destination and that's also not anything we want to tell the people |
| 1:41.1 | out there. There were a few things specifically in your comparison that I just |
| 1:45.6 | wanted to add some additional perspective to and that's why I was writing to you. |
| 1:50.4 | Should we start with train tickets? Because one of my absolute best trips last year was in |
| 1:55.6 | the course of a day going from the southernmost point of Switzerland at the Italian frontier |
| 1:59.9 | to the northernmost point |
| 2:01.6 | in Germany. It was a priceless journey, but I remember because I hadn't booked anything in advance, |
| 2:07.0 | I just turned up at the station at Lacano in the far south of Switzerland, and they kindly sold me a ticket, |
| 2:14.1 | and it cost getting on for £100 for a journey of maybe 150 miles. |
... |
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