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One Night - Luzern or Zurich?

At the end of our upcoming trip to the Berner Oberland, we need to settle on a city for our final afternoon/night in Switzerland. We have a late-morning flight out of Zurich the next day so my thought was to stay in either in Zurich or Luzern (which has a direct train to the Zurich airport). Any recommendations on which city is more enjoyable for an afternoon + evening?

Posted by
3160 posts

Definitely Luzern. Great little city. You might want to take the cog railway to the peak of Mt. Pilatus if you have time. Also has a great transport museum.

Posted by
32201 posts

Absolutely Lucere! While Zürich is also beautiful, Lucerne has a much more interesting "character" (IMO).

Posted by
4388 posts

I'm going to throw some cold water on this and strongly suggest you spend the night at a Zurich airport hotel so you have no worries about getting through security to your "late morning" flight. Which means you can spend a day in Lucerne but train to the airport that night. That's just me.

Posted by
412 posts

We just returned from Switzerland a few days ago, and did indeed take the morning train (8:10) directly from Luzern to the Zurich Flughafen (one of my new favorite words).

We arrived at 9:15 and had already printed out our boarding passes, so we had time to buy some chocolate from the Coop store in the airport, and then get to our gate for our 11:55 flight out.

It worked out well for us, but it was absolutely dependent on nothing messing up our departure from Luzern. Our hotel was a 10 minute walk from the station, and we made sure to allow extra time to buy our tickets that morning at the station.

Just another perspective - we did not end up seeing any of Zurich beyond the airport on this trip - but were delighted with our Luzern stay.

Laurie