A recent post on the Sweden Tourism blog (Sometimes the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason) made me nod my head and mumble “damn right!” – it said that “roughly 75% of Sweden’s existing tourism attractions are widely unknown abroad because nobody is putting them into salable tours and tourism packages.”

After my experiences at Arlanda airport in Stockholm last Friday, I think it’s more because it’s so bloody hard to get anywhere, and the airlines’ head honchos have the combined IQ of a stool sample. A very small stool sample, at that.

The objective was simple – to get from Stockholm to Umeå in the north sometimes during Friday. Without an expense account and within a reasonable budget. Two airlines fly from Stockholm-Arlanda to Umeå, and both had “planes less than half full,” as their ticket counter staff informed me. Yet they could only offer tickets at inflexible full- fare rates, both on-line and in person. And one of those was a so-called “budget” airline. SAS had tickets for more than 2000 SEK (200 euro) and Norwegian for a bit less – around 1400 SEK. That’s barely an hour before the departure. Needless to say, the planes went “less than half full,” because nobody in their right mind would pay those prices, and there was quite a large crowd of us gathered at the ticket counter.

Oddly enough, the same morning, one of the major Swedish dailies had a piece on the troubled airlines in Scandinavia. Gee, how come I’m not surprised?

OK, how about a train, you may ask? And that’s a very good question. There is one train a day that goes from Stockholm to Umeå, and it’s a night train. But pity the poor sucker that would look for this train on the Swedish Railways website. Even though the train is technically operated by Swedish Railways, the tickets are sold by a different train company – Connex. And the prices? They start at 800 SEK if you want to lie down, a bit less if you don’t mind sitting for 10 hours.

So, how about a bus? Yes, there is one. It’s called YBuss. It’s cheap, as slow as the train and a lot more convenient. The ticket from Stockholm to Umeå costs about 430 SEK. So what’s the catch? The company’s website is only in Swedish.

So yes, sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. We’re not talking here about a tiny, little village in the Great White North. We are talking about the 6th largest town in Sweden, a town, which aspires to become Europe’s Capital of Culture in 2014. (Yeah right, I wanna see THAT happen!)

photo courtesy of Bussbilder.se

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