I've been looking at booking an international ticket to Germany and I'm a bit confused at how the pricing is worked out. I'm about to purchase a GA card and I'm traveling with an international friend (no pass). When we looked at booking, the pricing for our tickets were identical even with the GA selected for me.
For example: Zurich HB to Munich HB on a direct ECE comes out at around 60 CHF return with/without a GA selected. The train stops at St Margrethen. I can also book a ticket from St Margrethen to Munich on the same ECE for 40 CHF return. Again though, it seems to make no difference if I select GA or not.
The card is advertised as giving 15% on cross-border trips, so how do you get this offer? Is this only on trains like the TGV Lyria?
Do you always have to split international fares in this way? I don't have a problem with this but it seems odd that the web system doesn't automatically discount intra-Switzerland portions of the journey.
The CHF 60 price is a saver ticket. These are point to point on a designated train only and the price is fixed. The regular price without fixed bookings is something north of CHF 200. The full price ex Zürich would see a reduction for the GA section (it would price from St Margrethen only), the saver price doesn't. Your answer is simple, book the ticket from St Margrethen and use your GA up to that point.
Your GA isn't valid after St Margrethen, the GA will make no difference to the price from that point for any fare.
I suspect the 15% discount would only apply to full fare tickets, not savers. Edit - just checked, yes, that's what it is. So 15% off the CHF 200-odd regular fare but nothing on savers.
You do get a deep discount with the HalbTax on national saver tickets- not necessarily 50% though.
Did you check the price also with Deutsche Bahn? Not sure about that route in particular but on other routes I've seen that their pricing often has little correlation with SBB (same goes for SNCF for French travel).