[Dec. 2024] We spent the New Year holidays in Sorrento, southern Italy.
We’ve been going to places within Italy a lot lately, but there’s a reason for this.
We moved to Italy in March, and as a Japanese person, I applied for a residence permit, but this bureaucratic process took so long that I was advised by experts to avoid going abroad (especially within the EU).
In 2024, we travelled a little outside the EU (Albania, the UK), but that’s why we avoided the EU countries.
So, hoping that it would be a little warmer, we chose Sorrento in southern Italy and departed from Milan on the high-speed train Italo.
Here’s the first stumbling block.
There is a cafe on the same floor as the platform inside Milan Central Station, and we’ve been there before, so we decided to have breakfast there.
As usual, we had a cappuccino and a croissant for breakfast, but it cost as much as €15 for two people!
At the cafe downstairs from our house, it would cost €6.
I was shocked… it was as expensive as Pret a Manger at Heathrow Airport in London.
At least the journey on the Italo was smooth.
After stopping at Milan Rogoredo, we only stopped at Afragola near Naples and arrived at our destination, Naples.
It took just under five hours.
But then we hit a big snag.
We found out that the train to Sorrento would leave from the underground platform at Naples Station and the station name would change to Garibaldi.
That was fine, but there was a woman in a red uniform standing in the underground concourse, and we made a big mistake by asking her how to buy a ticket.
We later found out that she was not a station employee, but an employee of a rip-off company called In Station.
At Garibaldi Station, we bought round-trip tickets to Sorrento as instructed, and it cost €70 for two people.
We were ignorant and easily gullible tourists who believed her words, “It’s an express train with reserved seats.”
When we went to the designated meeting place, there were only foreign tourists, and my husband was the only Italian who had been deceived.
I thought something was strange, so I checked the information after getting on the train, and it said that the express was €15 one-way, and that it would be €50 for two people round-trip.
A loss of €20.
It also said that a non-express regular train would be only €3.30 one-way.
Although there was the disadvantage of local trains being crowded, both trains took about an hour.
What’s more, the reserved seats thing was a big lie.
And that wasn’t enough, at an intermediate station, a bunch of local people got on.
It seemed the preceding train had broken down, so everyone had switched to our “express” train.
As a result, the “express” had to be quickly changed to a slow local train, and we trudged on to our final destination, Sorrento.
With such a big difference in price, it was only natural that there would be some kind of explanation, but the staff member on board pretended not to know a thing.
This is Naples, everyone.
I had a feeling that even if we made a fuss here, we would be the ones who suffered in the end, so we left Sorrento Station in silence.
