Three week budget

You can do all that for €49 with the Deutschland-Ticket.

There's a long thread about it.

That aside, you'll need to research the individual travel legs to see what they will cost you...

https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en

There are also German Rail Passes for a fixed price.

https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/passes/german-rail-pass

For a guest with limited time and a long travel list I would not recommend the Deutschland Ticket which allows regional trains only. Fast IC, EC or ICE trains cannot be used.

I agree with Mark - you can use regional trains for day trips and so on (for example, a regional train would work for Munich to Rothenburg o.d.T, but for long distances, it will pay to spend a bit more and take the high speed trains. If you buy them far enough in advance, the cost is much less than waiting till the last minute. I started booking trains about 4-5 months before my trip, once I had made my hotel reservations.

Use the 2nd link Russ gave you above to check destinations and prices, then start making lists of the prices, times, dates, etc. Before you purchase anything, I would recommend creating an account, and also downloading their app - DB Navigator - on your phone. This way when you get around to purchasing the tickets online, it will save them in your account and consequently you can access the tickets on your phone. No need for paper tickets - you just pull up the app and show the conductor the QR code.

You can find more information about the process here: https://www.bahn.com/en/booking-information/online-ticket

eltoepfer... There are no dates, no traveler numbers or ages, and no specific destinations (the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps include hundreds of possible train stations!) so if you want help narrowing down your ticketing strategy, well, there's just no way to address your specific needs right now.

But I CAN tell you that if I am being budget conscious, there's no way I would discard the deutschland-ticket option! One price, one ticket per person means... concrete savings over most other options. It's good for a calendar month. Travel within one of those, and the price is easy to figure... # persons x €49.

I'd like to interrupt the theoretical discussion thus far with the few FACTS about your journeys which ARE known. See below... Comments are based on random travel dates and probable destinations for your journeys:

1) 3 of your 7 trips are possible or desirable ONLY by regional train. (You can theoretically say you'd prefer the faster long-distance trains, but there are routes where they simply are not available.) In the Munich - Rothenburg case, you have a choice, but there's no time advantage for using long-distance trains.

• FRA - Bacharach

• Bavarian Alps (Füssen) - Rothenburg

• Munich - Rothenburg

2) The 4 other journeys offer a choice of regional-only or long-distance + regional, but these 4 show relatively MINOR travel-time differences between regional-only journeys and journeys that include long-distance trains; I checked morning journeys prior to 10 am:

Bacharach - Black Forest (Gengenbach) by regional train only (4:10) (hours:minutes)
Bacharach - Black Forest (Gengenbach) including high-speed trains (3:15)

Black Forest - Bavarian Alps (Füssen) by regional train only (6:40)
Black Forest - Bavarian Alps (Füssen) including long-distance trains (6:00)

Rothenburg - Dresden by regional train (6:00)
Rothenburg - Dresden including long-distance trains (5:30)

Dresden - Leipzig airport by regional train only (2:20)
Dresden - Leipzig airport by long-distance train (1:20)

Altogether, the savings in travel time for the long-distance options over the regional-only options across your entire 3-week trip amount to roughly 3 hours.

3) And what about long-distance train COSTS? What will you pay for each of the long-distance train journeys? I'd need dates for that. But I checked 4 days out from today and found these per person prices for morning departures from Bacharach > Black Forest (Gengenbach.)

9:06: €49.30
9:36: €53.20

What you actually pay for long-distance trains will depend on the date of travel and the date you eventually make your purchases. But this example alone shows that you might pay MORE for just one journey on a high-speed train than you'd pay for an entire travel month with the DeutschlandTicket.

4) Note also that the Deutschland ticket covers train journeys to other towns as well as the use of buses, subways, trams, etc. in any of these areas for no additional charge. With the D-ticket you can use the public transport in Dresden and Munich for free. With P-2-P tickets, not so - you'll pay extra for any of those trips.

5) What about the extra hassle of buying multiple tickets? The D-Ticket resolves that issue... The extra task is to cancel the subscription in a timely way - but that's it.

Some additional concerns...

6) Long-distance train journey prices: Tickets bought well in advance can be much cheaper. The walk-up/"flex" fares for Gengenbach > Füssen that I'm seeing run €87 - €105 depending on routing/date. If you buy now for December, I'm seeing some fares for €23.90. Naturally, most of us making multiple trips will want discounted fares, but those come with conditions. "Sparpreis" and "Supersparpreis" saver fares are train-specific and non-refundable (though vouchers are possible when you cancel Sparpreis tickets properly.) So if you pre-purchased that Bacharach > Gengenbach Super-Sparpreis ticket earlier this morning for that fast train journey at 9:36, priced at €53.20, and later fail to catch that train for any reason that is not the fault of the rail system... stuff happens, right?... then your money is gone. A new ticket that day will cost the "flex fare" price (full price) of €59.30, and the cost of getting from Bacharach to Gengenbach is now €112.50. Obviously, these saver fares require a certain level of commitment, which is always a little iffy, especially when you're planning a trip 2 months, 4 months, or 6 months out.

When you ride the regional trains - with a Deutschland Ticket - or any ticket with a specific date - you have the flexibility to use the ticket for ANY regional train trip that day... no worries if you arrive at the station late, change your plans, or even change your destination and route if you have the Deutschland-Ticket or one of the regional day passes.

7) Long-distance trains have an overall on-time performance of around 75%. Regional trains OTOH come in at around 90-95%. Some of the train trips you have in mind require multiple changes of train - so as a rule, your chances of making all your connections with regional trains only is a little better than with long-distance trains in the mix.