All Germany Tour?

Julie,

You might want to put your request for a just Germany tour on this link. I am hoping RS will look at this and create some new tours. If you have any specific cities, include them in your post.

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/tours/if-you-could-create-a-new-rs-tour

If all goes well, I expect there will be one in 2017.

Laura-that would be fantastic!! Keep me in mind, will you ;)

Have been waiting for an all Germany tour for years. Hopefully it will come to pass.

That's absolutely fabulous, Laura!!!! Not before time, and there are all sorts of places it could go.

If I had a hand in creating such a tour, I'd make sure that some of the villages and castles on the Fachwerkstrasse like Idstein and Braunfels were included, the incredible Schwebebahn in Wuppertal, the middle Rhein of course, and some eastern small towns such as in Thuringia as well as the obligatory Bavaria.

Heidelberg should be part of the route....

Nigel,

"Heidelberg should be part of the route...."

I wouldn't count on it. According to the RS Germany guidebook (a few years old)....

"This famous old university town attracts hordes of Americans. Any surviving charm is stained almost beyond recognition by commercialism. It doesn't make it into Germany's top three weeks."

Count myself (and my grandson) in on an All Germany tour. Our fingers are crossed!

Hi,

True...Heidelberg is swamped with tourists in the summer and rightly so. But so are Versailles, London, and Paris. My reaction to that ranges from regardless of that to so what. I vote for including Heidelberg on such an all Germany tour. I went there the first time in Germany.

This is a pretty good map of the highlights of Germany:
http://i.imgur.com/9BcKenL.jpg

A "All Germany Tour" without the Hanseatic towns of Northern Germany and the half-timbered towns of central Germany is incomplete. But as far as I know Rick Steves didn't even visit these places yet.

Wow! I can't believe they might finally make an All Germany tour. I've been on this board since 2008 and people have been requesting it since then (and possibly even before that).

I wonder if their customer base is changing slightly to include more repeat customers? I believe in the past the ratio has been: repeat customers- about 1/3 and new customers about 2/3 of their base. However, on the past 3 tours I've been on, at least 2/3 of my tour mates were on the their third or fourth tours ( I realize some of this is due to the tours I'm picking). On my Loire/So. France tour, I had several people on at least their 5th tours and two people on their 12th and 13th tours. I'm currently considering my sixth. Maybe they realize that there are people who are certainly capable of traveling on their own, but just enjoy going on tours. In the past many people on the forums have suggested creating Tier I and Tier II type of tours. Tier I's being geared toward brand new travelers (who might take a BOE tour for instance). Tier II tours would be geared more towards their more frequent repeat customers who want more itineraries offered because they would have already visited many of Europe's highlights on the Tier I tours.

In the recent post by yosemite1 about tour requests, I even saw some requests for tours they used to offer (but newer forum participants probably didn't know they existed before). I wonder if they will start cycling through some of their old itineraries eventually. The request for England's/Scotland/Wales trip is an example.

Would anyone from RS staff care to comment?

By the way, I should mention that I'm super excited about all the new itineraries offered, Germany included!!! I was considering the Villages of South England for next year, but now maybe I'll have to think about Gemany too! Decisions, decisions! ;)

Regarding a Germany tour being "incomplete:" True on including the Hansa cities/towns and the town of Weimar , the city of poets, (Deutschlands Dichterstadt) must be included.