Travel Options for Train or Rental Car

I love trains, and when I traveled through Germany I took the trains the entire way. But, I was by myself. With eight people, it would seem that renting two cars would be the most practical and economical. I'd check the car rental rate of picking up / dropping off in Munich vs. picking up in Salzburg etc. Sometimes you get a better deal renting the car for a longer period vs. picking up and returning several cars for shorter periods.

Still, if you really want to take trains part of the way, price it out yourself: you can't get prices for trains in Oct 2018 yet, but you can check prices for say the January and guess based on that. Assume you'd book your Bahn tickets well in advance - otherwise they are pretty expensive. Then check car rental rates at the various cities you've mentioned. I've never rented a car in Germany or Austria, but I've used EconomyCarRentals and Auto Europe to book/rent in Europe before. Auto Europe now makes you prepay for the entire reservation up front, I think, even if they will refund it up to a few days before pick-up if you need to change; that would make me nervous. EconomyCarRentals charges a small deposit up front, and it is refundable - I found out, but due to fluctuation of exchange rates, you may be refunded a slightly different amount than you were originally charged. Probably too early to reserve any car at this point where are you charged anything, though.

You can travel very inexpensively in Bavaria using Bayern Tickets. They are priced at 25 EUR for the first person and 6 EUR for each additional person up to 5 traveling together, so you'd need 2 4-person tickets to get from Munich airport to Salzburg (the main station in Salzburg is considered in Bavaria for train pricing). That is two 43 EUR tickets. Must travel after 9 am on weekdays, anytime weekends on regional trains only.

Returning to Fuessen, you could get there for the same price. You might look at renting your cars there. You might also return them there as you will be passing nearby going from Muerren to Freising. Or continue to Freising and return them there. Another option is to rent the cars in Freilassing, just over the border from Salzburg and return them in Freising.

Remember, you must purchase a vignette stickers and attach them to the windshields as you enter Switzerland. Austria needs them to, but if stay off the Autobahn, they are not required.

Freising to Munich and back can be done with group MVV tickets. You can get a local bus or taxi from Freising to the airport as it is only a couple of miles away.

Train to Freising, Train to Munich, Train to Freising, Train to Munich for flight home

Since the Munich airport (MUC) is just 20 minutes by bus from Freising, would it make more sense to do everything you want to do in Munich, then go to Freising and do everything there you want to do, then take the bus to MUC?

Lee, we were only going to Freising as I had read other forum comments about how easy it is to get to the airport from there and there was a good hotel and restaurant there. I thought we could drop cars off at Munich and catch Train to Freising fairly cheap. I like the idea of taking taxi’s to the airport on our day of departure. We wanted to pick up cars in Munich after we get back from Salzburg by train so we could travel to Fussen and stop at Linderhof on the way there. An option is to drop off the cars in Fussen and go by train to Colmar and then Stechelberg for our Murren stay and then back to Freising. If not, then we just keep the cars for the rest of the trip and drop them off in Munich. I guess we could just stay in Munich instead of Freising as on our last day we want to see Dachau in the morning and then the Hofbrauhaus for dinner that evening. The cost of trains vs keeping the cars was where I wasn’t sure what to do.

Thank you Andrew and Sam, I’m still looking at your comments.

Correct me if I am wrong, but we needed a car to visit all of the villages around Colmar.

Some of the small towns around Colmar are accessible by train or bus, but a car would be a more efficient means of transportation.

You will know your group better than we can.

Over the duration of the trip, and all the money spent by 8 people to get to Europe from OK, I would think that the difference in ticket prices (particularly when we can show you ways to do it very cheaply) and car rental would be relatively insignificant.

A question you may want to ask yourself is what sort of group of people do you have? Are they chatty or do they like to sit quietly? Do they divide naturally into two groups of four or do they like to interact with each other across the groups?

In the car you may want to have a phone in each car which can call and text the other car. In a car, if you are driving in Austria you need a Vignette for each car's windscreen (€7.90 per car for 10 days or less) if you are at all on the Austrian Autobahn (there is a back way around arriving from Munich to Salzburg but is less fast and straightforward than staying on the Autobahn to Salzburg Süd) and every driver driving in Austria and France requires an IDP (International Drivers Permit, around $20 at the AAA plus 2 photos).

In the train even if you can't get two tables of 4 adjacent (gets a bit crowded after time passes, especially if OK folks are as big as some TX folks) you can be scattered around a bit with a bit more room each and people who are sociable can wander from group to group chatting, eating and drinking (there are even toilets on the trains so you don't have to stop the whole convoy when one member of the group needs "just one more" trip down the hall. Everybody gets the same view on the train - nobody in the group has driving eyes, and nobody has map eyes.

If you want to be in the little villages around Colmar a pair of cars is easier. If you weren't stopping at Linderhof (I've never seen it despite decades of travel in the area) I would have thought that using the trains (in conjunction with Bayern-Tickets) is unbeatable in the trip to Fussen and presumably Neuschwanstein.

Thanks Nigel and others for your comments. I believe we will keep the cars through the Colmar part of the trip as some of you have suggested. Now I’m thinking of maybe dropping the cars off in Freiberg, Germany and then take train to Lauterbrunnen and on up to Murren for two nights. We would then take train to Munich/Freising. I will have to see what the drop off charge would be for picking up cars in Munich and dropping off in Freiberg. Then we have the train costs to Switzerland and then back to Munich, I’ll have to compare that to just keeping the rental cars like we originally planned.