Munich car rental question

Hi,

If possible, flip your stays around and have Munich be the last destination. Go visit Fuessen, Berchtesgaden and Salzburg first.

Paul

This is hard to calculate. Is there on the way to the airport a traffic jam? You need some time for the way to the S-Bahn Station and to buy a ticket. The S-Bahn takes about 50 minutes from the Airport to the Hauptbahnhof. You can save some minutes when you use the S8 and get off at Ostbahnhof and waiting there for the Night Train. (This should be checked for the day of travel.)

"in case we want to take it to Dachau"

Dachau is so easy and inexpensive to get to by train and bus. You don't need a car for that. Other than Dachau, everything that people usually want to visit in Munich is in the inner zone.

If you are going to be in Berchtesgaden, return the car there or in Salzburg. There are hourly regional trains from Salzburg/Barchtesgaden and you can do that trip with a Bayern-Ticket for 23€ for the first person, 5€ for each additional.

Renting in Germany and returning to Austria is going to incur those horrendous cross border drop fees. A rental is a pain in cities (like Munich). However, it is useful to see the castles.

If you pick up your car at an airport or a train station there always will be a surcharge which they'll only tell you about upon pick-up. It's approx. 20% of the total rental value. Also there is a premium to pay for cross-border one-way rentals.

Dropping off your car after hours is not so much of a problem as most stations have safe key drop boxes. With the larger, reputable companies like Sixt, Europcar, Hertz that's always worked just fine for us. You can assume that there are drop boxes at any of their stations.

Most rental car companies have offices in Freilassing, Germany, just across the river from Salzburg. From there it is less than 2 hours (about the same time as driving) to Munich Hbf by hourly regional trains. It cost 23€ for the first person, 5€ more for each additional person up to 5, total.

From the Hertz office it is about 4/10 of a mile, an eight minute walk, to the Freilassing Bahnhof, but it's closed on Sunday, so use the dropbox.

If you drop the car at the airport, it's a 41-45 minute trip by S-Bahn to the Munich Hauptbahnhof. Tickets are 10,40€ per person, 22,30€ for a group ticket for up to 5 people.

I've gotten around Berchtesgaden just fine with the buses that come free with the pass I get from my hotel.

Andreas it depends on the rental length. The cost of picking up at an airport is nothing like 20 per cent of the total cost for longer bookings.

Thanks for the tip on the Freilassing office but since it is closed on Sunday, are you sure there is a drop box? Does that mean there is also a drop box at the Munich train station rental location?

I think that would be the ideal situation of we can just leave the car after the office is closed. That way we do not need to take any additional trains, etc.

Unfortunately, I'd be kind of surprised if there was a good drop option at the train station. It's a multistory structure shared by many rental car companies. Space on the ground floor is very limited in terms of places to park (employees take the cars up the ramp because they probably need to play a bit of car tetris in order to get everything to fit) and a business probably wants to keep that area well-secured when employees aren't around lest the very low budget backpackers think they can do a bit of squatting for the night between the Skodas.

(edit)

Also the ramp is about a block or two from the train station- get directions at time of picking up the car, and expect to circle around a few times when returning a car there, even with a good GPS.