Help with Germany, Austria, and Switzerland itinerary June 2025

Welcome to the forum.

I recommend to do an intinerary search in the Germany forum. You will find dozens of discussed ones reflecting your preferences.

For driving a car in Germany ensure valid driving permission for Germany, in some cases not only driver's license. Official info:
https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/EN/Articles/StV/Roadtraffic/validity-foreign-driving-licences-in-germany.html

In my view, this is way too much area to cover in less than two weeks, and you need to narrow down your focus. I think you will be spending more time in the car than you realize, and you need to factor in time needed to repack a car and check in and out of accommodations. Make sure you have adequately budgeted the amount it will cost for fuel and parking.

When you say "visit", what do you mean? Overnight? Several nights? IMO, your proposed itinerary has a lot of hopping from place to place. Lucerne is great, but the Bernese Oberland area of Switzerland is even better. At the very least, I would drop Salzburg from your trip; avoid the backtracking; save it for another trip. And, is there a particular reason why Garmisch is on your list?

When locating lodging, I will frequently start by looking at booking.com to research possible options. After narrowing those down, I may check reviews on Trip Advisor and Google. If the hotel has direct booking, then I ALWAYS book with them instead of going through a third party booking agency. If you find that the cost on a third party site is less, then contact the hotel, because 9 times out of ten they will match, or better the cost that you have seen. Pay very close attention to cancellation policies. Since your proposed trip is less than 5 months away, I would suggest you find accommodations ASAP.

Hi, martintealla,

It sounds like you will have 13 nights, which essentially gives you 12 days. The more places you add to your itinerary, the more travel time you will have, which means less time to actually spend sightseeing. You have 5-7 places listed here (is Vilseck a day trip from Rothenburg?), which means you have at least 4 travel days, which take up time. That is a lot of driving once you get to Bavaria.

I know it's hard to cut back on places as you want to see it all, but I would consider omitting Switzerland as you are really backtracking there, and omit Garmisch and focus on Salzburg. That would give you 2-3 nights in Heidelberg, 2-3 nights in Rothenburg (with trip to Vilseck?), 2-3 nights in Garmisch, then 3-4 nights in Salzburg. Then back to Frankfurt for the last night.

In terms of lodging, get your itinerary together first, then you can do a search on this forum for lodging. Just go to the search bar on top (on a computer - on your phone, just click on the 5 horizontal lines on top and the search bar will open up) and search, using terms like "________ hotel." There is a filter for dates so you can just look for threads from the last 2 years.

Another way to look for lodging is to go to the town's website. Every town in Germany has one, and they all end in .de. So for example, for Heidelberg, go to https://www.heidelberg.de, click the option to use English, then click on the menu and look for something that says "tourism" or "visit". Once there, look for Lodging or Accommodations and check them out.

Another option is to use booking.com to find places. You can search for specific destinations then filter it by number of rooms, type of accommodation and so on. However, I would not book anything there, unless there is no other option (some small places only allow booking via Booking.com). Once you have a few options to look at, go to hotel or B&Bs website to actually book your stay.

Figure out what you want to do in each place. For planning, don’t count on doing anything on your travel days. Your plan looks fine to me, just do Salzburg before Garmisch