Vacation Rentals in Germany

I use vrbo.com to book rentals both in the U.S. and Europe. Another similar site is homeaway.com.

What town do you want to stay in? Find it at www.{town name}.de. Look for Ferienwohnungen. No booking website will ever give you as good a price as doing it yourself.

These sites are really good for Germany but for other European destinations as well. Better search functions than vrbo as well: www.homeaway.com over 13,000 rentals in Germany alone!!! www.interchalet.co.uk

I'm going to second Lee's suggestion, if you're looking for the best price. I've found that vrbo rentals and the other rental sites are more expensive, and that the best route is going through the local tourism website to link directly to the owners.

Lee's suggestion of using the official website of the city or town you're staying in works really well when you know exactly that you want to stay in a particular town. We've done that esecially for small towns when there's only a limited pool of potential accommodations and we wanted to make sure we don't miss one. It doesn't work quite as well if you are looking at a region e.g. Black Forest. And many of these official town websites have limited search functions that you may need when you look for particular features. You may have to click through every single one of them to figure our, for example, which ones have the required number of bedrooms. The websites of the rental organizations definitely have an advantage if you need to conduct a larger search. In terms of price I don't think there is a big difference as it's usually the property owner that takes a cut by using their services. I've talked to our host when we rented through Home Away before and they mentioned to us to please rent through them directly the next time as it would be the same price for us but a better deal for them.

Since I usually travel alone, maybe with one other person, I can't economically use apartments, so I've never used an apartment booking website. However, I doubt that they are much different than the room booking services. I have compared the places I find by using town list with what's offered on the booking website like Venere, Booking, Inthotel, etc. IMO, booking on one of these websites is like getting tickets from RailEurope. They don't offer a full selektion {we still can't use the correct spelling of "Selektion"} (only the properties that pay to be listed), often nothing where I want to go, and usually it's only the more expensive places. Case in point: in 2004, I toured the Ronamtic Road without a car just to prove you could. I spent one night in Weikersheim. On the Weikersheim website, I found six properties in in Weikersheim, four on the Marktplatz, two more nearby. The town website also included nearby properties, and I stayed at one in Laudenbach, 3 min away by train (every two hours, as many buses in between). Booking.com shows shows nothing in Weikersheim, itself. It does show four places from 1.7-5.5 miles from town. The first two places are in a nearby town with only bus service, and that only 5 buses each way from 8 AM to 6 PM.