The five mountains your Swiss Travel Pass won't touch
Most Swiss mountain excursions give you something with a pass in your pocket, a half-price fare, sometimes the whole ride free. These five give you nothing. You'll pay the same at the ticket window as someone who walked in off the street with no pass at all.
No discountAletsch, ValaisBettmerhornOpposite the Eggishorn, which the pass does halve. Same glacier, same view, and the pass does nothing for this side of it.You pay About CHF 55See Bettmerhorn →
No discountBürgenstock, Lake LucerneThe Hammetschwand liftThe highest outdoor lift in Europe, at the top of a funicular the pass halves and a boat it covers outright. The lift itself is on you.See Bürgenstock →
No discountStoos, SchwyzFronalpstock and Klingenstock chairliftsThe funicular up to Stoos is covered in full. The two chairlifts from the village to the ridge are not, which is where the walk actually starts.See Stoos →That's the whole list, and it's worth knowing before you build a day around one of them.
Why three of these five catch you out
Three of the five sit directly beside, or directly on top of, something the pass does cover. You get the covered bit, you feel good about it, and then you hit a second ticket window for the part you actually came for.
Bettmerhorn versus Eggishorn: same glacier, different price
The Bettmerhorn and the Eggishorn look at the same Aletsch glacier from opposite sides. The Eggishorn is half price with your pass. The Bettmerhorn is full price. Same ice, same day, and the pass only helps you on one side of it.
| Eggishorn | Bettmerhorn | |
|---|---|---|
| View | Aletsch glacier | Aletsch glacier |
| Pass discount | Half price | None |
| What you pay | About half of full fare | About CHF 55 round trip |
| Base village | Fiesch | Bettmeralp |
If the glacier is the reason you're in Valais, go up from Fiesch and put the difference towards lunch.
The Hammetschwand lift: free boat, half-price funicular, full-price finish
The Bürgenstock day is almost comedy. Your catamaran from Lucerne, 25 minutes across the lake, costs you nothing with the pass. The funicular up from the water is half price. Then you walk the cliff path to the Hammetschwand lift, the highest outdoor lift in Europe, and the pass does absolutely nothing for you.
It's still a lovely day, and the walk out to the lift costs nothing. But if you're budgeting, budget for that last ride.
Stoos: the funicular is covered, the chairlifts aren't
The Stoos funicular is the steepest in the world and your pass covers it in full. Wonderful. But almost everyone rides it to do the Klingenstock–Fronalpstock ridge walk, and that walk needs the chairlifts at either end, neither of which the pass discounts. So the free bit gets you to the village, and the paid bit gets you to the reason you came.
Corvatsch and Parsenn: no covered neighbour, no discount either
These two are simpler. Corvatsch, in the Engadin, is the highest cable car in the region and it charges around CHF 76 whether or not you have a pass. Parsenn-Weissfluhgipfel at Davos is run as ski infrastructure rather than public transport, which is exactly why the pass has no hold on it, it isn't part of the network in the first place.
No workaround on either. If you want them, you pay for them.
How to plan around the gaps
- Check your shortlist against the full mountain coverage list before you fix any dates.
- Where two mountains show you a similar view, pick the covered one, Eggishorn over Bettmerhorn is the clearest swap of the five.
- If the uncovered summit is genuinely the point, budget the full fare and don't let it sour the day.
- Balance your week with the mountains that cost you nothing at all with a pass.
It's also worth reading what else isn't included, because mountains aren't the only place the pass stops short. Oeschinensee is the covered side of the same system, if you want the other half of the picture.
