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Don't Forget The Vignette!

artnbarb

1000+ Posts
I knew this but had forgotten - we'll need to stop in German before we cross over into Austria to buy a vignette! At least Austria lets you buy a 10 day pass rather than having to pay for an entire year like Switzerland!
 
10 day pass is better than a year yes, but we go skiing in Austria every other year and only ever go for 7 days so having to pay out for 10 days feels like a bit of a con. It really doesnt bother me though to honest and paying for 3 days that i wouldnt use is by far the cheapest thing on a skiing holiday.

Only reason i read this post was I wasnt aware i needed a vignette for Switzerland. As I mentioned earlier we drive to Austria every other year and spend a week in a small village called Alpbach not far from the German border and relatively close to Munich. As the years have gone by I found that driving on the autobahns is far far slower than cutting down through France then as late as possible cut through to Stuttgart. However on the way back we have tried various routes and last time went through Switzerland to see how it compared. Needless to say we never bought a vignette and as usual we managed to find huge traffic jams that made the route very slow. On a positive it was probably one of the best drives Ive done.
 
We drove through Switzerland for just a few hours this summer, between northern Italy and Alsace, and we had to buy the vignette... two of them actually, since we were each driving a mini-van! I struggle with buying something that is for a year for just a few hours, but then we pay huge tolls on some of our drives, so I just have to think of it as a toll.

Charley once didn't buy his vignette (10-day) in time for Austria... he crossed into Austria and realized he didn't have it. He was about to get off at the first exit, and he was pulled over... and fined!
 
I guess we are very lucky then as we drove for a good 5 or 6 hours through Switzerland. We've never missed getting one in austria, its kind of become a ritual now and we stop and grab some lunch and a coffee before we head up the Alps to Alpbach.
 
One time we rented a car in Switzerland and were dropping off in Rome, so they gave us a car with Italian plates and no tax sticker! We didn’t even notice because we frequently rented in Switzerland and they always had the sticker. We were pulled over on the motorway and fined. We had to pay the fine right there and in cash. AutoEurope, who we rented through, reimbursed us for the fine and cost of the tax sticker.

Now I always check the cars we rent in Switzerland.

On our trip next week we are driving our UK car to Switzerland and will have to purchase the tax sticker. I’ll make sure we get it at or before the border. I was considering finding a route where you don’t use the highway because we will only be on it the day we arrive and the day we leave.
 
We got our Switzerland tax sticker, the vignette, today when we reached the Swiss border. There was a lineup of cars for the border. They were not checking passports, but instead were checking tax stickers and if you didn’t have one you bought one for 40CHF. The guy even stuck it to the inside of the windscreen.
 

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