During out 11 months in Europe, we used the UK and Ireland to break up our time in the Schengen area. As we had so long planned in the UK and Ireland, we dreamed of doing a road trip and seeing all the beautiful little towns along the way. Unfortunately for us, hiring a car was incredibly expensive (like thousands-of-pounds-for-a-few-weeks expensive) and it quickly became obvious that we would have to find another way to see everything we wanted. Luckily, both countries have great bus and train systems so we took advantage of those to see the beautiful places we’d be dreaming of. It was honestly quite easy to see the UK and Ireland without a car!
Bus companies in the UK
As our favourite European bus company FlixBus (which we used frequently – read more on that here) does hardly any routes in the UK, we had to turn to the local budget bus companies, which are Megabus and National Express. Both companies are affordable, but Megabus tends to be cheaper on most journeys. However, it’s definitely worth checking out both websites to see which has the cheaper fare for the route you want.
They’re both quite comfortable with toilets and sometimes wifi onboard, tend to run on time (or close to), and we never had one cancel on us. They have under the bus storage and usually go to and from stations that are in the middle of the city so honestly we recommend either company.
Train companies in the UK
While we loved travelling by bus, sometimes the route we wanted to take wasn’t an option. When this happened, we turned to train companies. The UK has numerous train companies that run in different areas of the country. The ones we used were LNER for areas north of London, and Southern Railway and South Western Railway for the south of England.
All three train companies run on time, are comfortable and safe but keep in mind that they’re EXPENSIVE (they can often be more expensive than flights on the same route). The earlier you can book, the better, as tickets prices steadily increase as it gets closer to the date of the journey. Tickets are usually available to buy 3 months in advance. We only used trains for journeys that the buses didn’t do or saved us a lot of time, but we tried not to use them often due to the cost.
Travelling Around Ireland
For our time in Ireland, we travelled by both train and bus. For buses, we used Bus Eireann, and for trains we used Irish Rail.
The buses with Bus Eireann weren’t the most comfortable, and they were usually a little late, but not by a dramatic amount. The journey’s themselves were as expected.
Irish Rail was pretty good as well, although one of our trains was late after stopping between stations for close to half an hour with no information from the staff as to why we had stopped. It’s obviously more expensive than the bus, so we only used this on journeys that that bus didn’t do.
Finding Other Options
Hopefully you’ll be fully equipped with the companies we’ve already mentioned, but if you’re wanting to journey along a route that isn’t covered, we would recommend using Rome2Rio. On this website, you can see all the different ways to get from one spot to another, and if there is a public transport option available, you will be able to see the company that runs that service.
For trains, we also found that TrainLine was a great option to see which train companies run different routes, and to see the times and prices of the journeys. You can book through TrainLine, but we preferred to find the best option for us and then book directly through the company, to ensure we didn’t run into any issues with tickets or not being informaed of timetable changes. We also used TrainLine when we were booking trains in other European countries, which we wrote about here.
And that’s everything we used on our UK and Ireland road trip, coming in way under what it would have cost to hire a car! It really is very easy and the bus and train network is so extensive that you can see almost everything you want to with a bit of time and planning.
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