Room for Family of 5 in Salzburg & Munich

It’s high season and Salzburg is small. Consider an area outside of Salzburg, like St. Gilgen. Use Booking.com.

Have you tried Hotel Laimer Hof in Munich? We stayed there last summer (but not as a family of five). They are 4-5 blocks from a tram stop, walking distance to Nymphenburg Palace, grocery/restaurants/family-friendly biergarten (yes, really!) and park within reasonable walking distance. The management is VERY friendly and helpful! Breakfast is delicious. You will want to email them to see if they have a suitable room. I see on their website that they can accommodate families in adjoining rooms; not sure how this will fit your budget but it would be worth asking. Enjoy your travels!

We stayed in Hostel Jufa in Salzburg. It was inexpensive, close to the city center, and we had a private room for 2. Not sure about rooms for 5, though. The breakfast was in a large room, had lots of choices, and there were a ton of kids. In Munich, we stayed in 4you Hostel and Hotel. Same comments as above.

Americans think that hostels are grungy places filled with hippies and drugs. In Europe, we have stayed in many hostels, since we are always cheap. They are generally fine. Most have private rooms as well as bunk rooms. Sometimes the private rooms have baths, and the place is not different than a reasonable US hotel.

Budget accommodations for families are often possible outside major cities. Rather than locate two separate places for 5 that are likely outside your budget, could you instead take a single base town in between, then travel into these cities for sightseeing? (That's what I'd do kids on my normal every-man's travel budget if I had 3 kids.)

Prien is right in between Munich and Salzburg, on Herrenchiemsee Lake (which offers both recreation and Bavarian King Ludwig II's Herrenchiemsee Palace) and also on the main train line. From a Prien base, your entire family could take a direct train into the city on day trips for €31/day using the Bayern Ticket.

Prien lists 119 apartments at its local tourist office website. Enter your dates and your occupant information and see what's available. ( I came up with 4 places available for a family with 3 kids, using a set of arbitrary dates, July 11-18.) You will get prices and a few words in English - but the apartment descriptions will be in German and you will need to translate the text. You can also google the name or address of the apartment to see if there's a homepage for the place (and perhaps an English-language description.)

This place in Rimsting (a neighbor town to Prien) has one apartment that works for 5 and shows availability in July:
https://tportal.toubiz.de/prien/ukv/house/DEU00000060011066340

This brochure for Prien has over 70 pages with a complete set of listings but is in German.

You can look at other towns in the area as well. Perhaps Bernau or Aschau or a town elsewhere on the lake would work for you.

One commercial listing site with an English-language option that is user-friendly is www.vacation-apartments.com. The mother site (in German - traum-ferienwohnungen.de ) has a lot more listings but the English version may have what you need. Listings like the one below in Bernau have an availability calendar you can check. This place in Bernau accommodates 5 and shows availability throughout July.

https://www.vacation-apartments.com/33030/

Be sure about a place before you book. Generally, cancellation isn't possible unless the owner has a cancellation policy - be sure to ask about that. Some owners will request a deposit, but many do not, which makes booking pretty easy - but either way, you can be held legally responsible for the rental fee unless there's an agreement about cancellations.

A 5 person room will be tough to find. I'd second using booking.com and looking in smaller towns with good connections.

Hostels are another good option as many the DJH ones are family oriented. Here is one in Munich in a good location: http://www.jugendherberge.de/en/youth-hostels/muenchen-park249/amenities

DJ

We took our family of 5 to Germany this summer, and ran into the same issues. I recommend you contact a hotel directly. Often, you're unable to book a room online for five people in Europe (I've even run into troubles booking for three). With three teenagers, we like to have 2 rooms. I was unable to book this online and emailed the hotel asking if they had any options for us. The hotel directed me to book the kids' room with 2 occupants. Upon arrival, they had a cot already set up for us!

If you want to go the AirBnN route:
Having more than one bathroom was important to us, and that can be hard to find in Munich! I contacted a management company directly, told them my dates, and they were able to accommodate us. They were listed as unavailable on AirBnB, but in actuality, an apartment was available. They had a date blocked our for cleaning, which wasn't necessary given our morning departure time.

In 2011, we traveled as a family (2 adults, 3 kids 24, 21, 21) in Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. We looked for accommodation for all 5. At that time, I was able to find accommodation for all of us for under €100 for all but one night. We did it all ahead of time, and stayed often in rooms, not hotels. We used booking.com, www.vacation-apartments.com or other sites like that. In Budapest, we stayed in a private apartment with 2 BDRMs, kitchen, bath. In Croatia, we stayed in a house. S of Salzburg, we stayed in a charming agrotourismo near Altenmarkt. My kids loved it, since they like chickens, cats, etc. Your kids probably do as well. We wanted to go to Salzburg but there was a lot of neat stuff in the country, and we never got to the city.

We did have a car. You might want to think about that. Driving in Austria is very easy. Having a car with little persons makes a lot of stuff easier.

We stayed at the Hotel Hahn in Munich, it was easy to reach from the HBF with both a tram and S-Bahn stop nearby. There are several family rooms, we were 3 but had a room that slept 6. The staff were great and even prepared a very late night meal for us after our train from Verona was delayed by hours and hours. We stayed in August 2015 and the rates were very reasonable.

I've been looking in Salzburg for similar rooms. These all have family rooms that can accomodate 4-5 people and are generally less expensive and no-frills: ACHAT Plaza Zum Hirschen, A&O Salzburg Hauptbahnhof, Meininger, Pension Elizabeth, Hotel Drei Kruz. You might have better luck looking at apartments on Booking.com or airbnb.