Bern Switzerland to Hamburg Germany - best travel option?

Zurich is your best airline option. Many flights a day by Eurowings and Swiss. Eurowings is cheapest, but still 0ver 100 CHF pp.

It looks like 5 1/2 months out, you can get one of those 7 1/2 hour trains with just a single change in Basel for 40 EUR pp with Saver tickets. The air route will take 6 hours Bern to Hamburg city center when you factor travel time to Zurich, wait time at the airport for check-in, security, boarding time, flight time, waiting for luggage time, travel into Hamburg.

Saving barely one hour by flying I would go by train to spare myself all this hassle nowadays associated with flying and in addition having benefit of scenery which is better from the train than from the plane.

Hi Sam!
You've given me food for thought! It would save a lot of $ to take the train and it's really not that much more time after factoring everything into the equation. I notice the one transfer is only a 7 minute one so hopefully it would be easy and quick to find the next track/train in Basel. It is nice that only an hour in, after making the transfer, we stay on that train the remainder of the time. Will have to weight that against the hopper flight from Zurich. Thank you so much!! :0)

Thank you also Ilja! We are thinking alike! :0)

The 40 EUR ticket (actually 79.80 EUR for 2) is nonrefundable, except by paying a 19 EUR fee and train specific. If the 7 minute change time intimidates you, just click on the "change other data" button (on the DB website), then click on "connections" button and pick a minimum 10 minute connection time. Now you will see you can take a train from Bern 1/2 hour earlier, giving you a 37 minute connection time in Basel. That makes it an 8 hour journey.

Hi,

The Bern to Hamburg Hbf via Basel journey has a night route, (NJ train) ... very doable with a change (ample time) in Basel, after that it's direct to Hamburg...perfect. That's absolutely my choice.