My husband and I would like to take a guided 2-3 day tour of the Romantic Road through a tour company from Munich to Frankfurt. Any suggestions on what tour company we should use?
We plan to take a day trip through Grey Line from Munich to Neuschwanstein and Linderhof Castles, but Grey Line does not seem to have overnight tours. Thank you for any recommendations!
I'm unaware of such tours. But if you or a travel agent is able to arrange rooms and a car rental, local tourist offices can provided guided sightseeing tours. Here are a few I'm aware of that do public and private tours:
Würzburg: http://www.wuerzburg.de/en/visitors/guided-walking-tours/index.html
Rothenburg: http://www.tourismus.rothenburg.de/index.php?id=490
Nördlingen has a variety of tours that can be arranged; it seems they're available in languages other than German for an additional €9. Contact the Tourist office via email address at the bottom of the page:
http://www.noerdlingen.de/Gefuehrte-Touren/Stadtfuehrungen-Erlebnisfuehrungen-Themenfuehrungen
Augsburg sights and tours: http://www.augsburg-tourismus.de/augsburg-city.html
I believe that the Romantic Road coach, which makes a day-long trip from Frankfurt to Füssem with short stops along the way also offers some packages where you take the bus, get off for overnight at a stop, then proceed on the bus the next day. See www.romantischestrasse.de/fileadmin/romantische_strasse/pdf/RomanticRoadCoach2016.pdf
I think I would read their reviews on Trip Advisor before booking this tour.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g187337-d3587687-Reviews-Romantic_Road_Coach-Frankfurt_Hesse.html
Better would be to pick out which towns you would like to visit, train there, book your hotels and perhaps book a private tour in each town. This will be cheaper than the bus tours and 10 times better.
Normally, I would have recommended you not take a guided tour, but do it yourself, but you seemed intent on having a guided tour, and the Romantic Road Coach is the only way I know of to do that. I believe Rick does recommend the Coach.
If you want to do it yourself, you should familiarize yourself with the German Rail website to get train and bus schedules (the Bahn site gives the prices of train tickets, but not bus fares, which will be nominal).
Start by taking regional trains to Rothenburg using a Bayern-Ticket. Spend a night or two in Rothenburg, then take buses from the Rothenburg Bhf to Dinkelsbühl (there is no train station in Dinkelsbühl; you'll have to get there by bus). I'm not sure if you can use a Bayern-Ticket for all the buses that day, but in 2007, I spent 8,60€ for the bus between Dinkelsbühl and Rothenburg. Stop in Dinkelsbühl for a few hours, then take the next bus to Nördlingen. In 2007, I paid 4,50€ for the bus between Nördlingen and Dinkelsbühl. Spend at least one night in Nördlingen. Nördlingen is Rothenburg's less touristy little sister. It has a lot of Fachwerk buildings, an almost complete wall with a Wehrgang you can walk on, and a church tower you can climb for a view of the town and surrounding land. However, it lacks a Christmas shop and a Crime and Punishment Museum.
You might want to take a side trip to the Harburg castle, 15 minutes by train to the south of Nördlingen. It's about a km walk to town from the Bahnhof, then a short steep climb up to the castle, so you will want to do the trip without luggage (there are no lockers in the Harburg Bahnhof).
In my opinion, the bus route from Rothenburg to Nördlingen is possibly the best part of the Romantic Road because it features three walled towns and the buses follow route 25, the official Romantic Road. After Nördlingen, I would just take the train to Füssen, with a possible stop at another Romantic Road town, Augsburg.
BTW, I would not put very much credence in the reviews on TripAdvisor, which has been widely criticized for fake, planted review posted (good one) by companies and (bad ones) by competitors. A branch of the Italian government recently tried to fine TripAdvisor half a million euro for allowing misleading reviews (Ref). TripAdvisor only avoided the fines by claiming that they had adequately warned readers that their reviews weren't necessarily accurate. In particular, I spotted an erroneous bad review of a place I stayed at in 2013. The reviewer described the location of the place in the reviews, and her location was far (over 100 km) from the actual location of the property. It might have been an honest mistake; she stayed at another place with the same name, but the place she reviewed was not the one on TripAdvisor. I've tried numerous times to report the review, but T/A doesn't respond.
