Busses - Book in the US or book on the spot

Unfortunately you do need to book the bus ahead. It will come with the rail ticket from Munich. There is one bus every two hours with limited capacity. It is not like the train. Don't know the price difference but you can look it up at bahn.de. Not familiar with the run from Prague to Vienna.

Max, You can use the bahn.de website to determine the details of the two trips you'll be making. You can either buy the ticket from Munich to Prague online or buy it locally a day or two before you'll be travelling. The current prices show a Saver fare of €49 and regular fare of €64.60 for the Bus. The cheaper ticket will be specific for a particular departure time, and likely won't be refundable. I've never had any trouble buying tickets locally at the DB Reisezentrum in the Munich station a day or two before travel. The EurAide office is Desk 1 on the left, and I've found them to be enormously helpful. Their staff all speak excellent English. I'd probably use train from Prague to Vienna. Travel time is 4H:45M via direct train, but you'll have to determine which station to use in Vienna. I'm not overly familiar with the choices, so I'll leave it to Lee or one of the others to fill in the blanks on that point. In the same situation, I'd just buy the ticket to Vienna on arrival in Prague, since I'm at the station anyway. Happy travels!

The information given above is slightly outdated. There are many bus companies competing on the Munich-Prague route and the further in advance you book online the cheaper it gets. www.flixbus.de

If you book well in advance (up to 92 days allowed) on the German Rail site, you can get a discount fare as low as €29.00 for the direct Munich-Prague bus. The ticket will be for a specific departure date and time and will be non-refundable and non-exchangeable. The standard fare is €64.60. All seats are reserved. If you book well in advance on the Czech Rail site, you can get a discount fare of 502 CZK (about €19) for Prague-Vienna. The standard 2nd class fare listed on the Austrian Rail site is €62.80.

As Ken says, the full fare for the bus is 64,60€. That is what you would pay if you bought your ticket less than three days in advance. The lowest fare, which goes on sale 92 days in advance, is 29€. There is a limited number of tickets at the lowest fare; when these sell out the fare goes up, typically by 10€, until only full fare tickets are left. However, that route doesn't sell really quickly, so I can see 29€ tickets for less than a month from now. YOu can only get that price, by the way, by booking on the Bahn website. Use this Bahn webpage to find schedules. It has more options than Bahn.de (homepage), and if you use Bahn.de, it will get you to this page eventually. The bus makes the trip non-stop from Munich Hbf to Prague's main station in just under 5 hours, but the only place you can catch the bus is at Munich Hbf. However, if you start from another rail station, transit to Munich Hbf is probably included in the 29€ price. There are trains, 3 or 4 daily, that make the trip from Munich to Prague in six hours. You can make that trip to Pilsen with a Bayern-Böhmen-Ticket (25€ for the first person, 4,50€ more each person up to five, total) and buy a Czech Rail ticket for Pilsen to Prague for less than 4€/adult, so less than 20€/person for two. The advantage to using the train is that you can go from anywhere in Bavaria to Prague without going through Munich, and, more importantly, there is no advance purchase required. You can purchase the Bayern-Böhmen-Ticket at that price at any rail station on the day of travel.

Thank you all.
I guess I will forego the flexibility. The price difference is astounding.

If you are still unsure about your travel times, you could book two different discount tickets (one early, one late) for less than the price of one last-minute ticket. Unfortunately, on more and more routes in more and more countries, there is a substantial discount for non-refundable advance booking, or, to look at it another way, a substantial penalty for last minute booking and for flexibility like changeable tickets. And, more and more, you have to book online to get the best fares. It's here in the US, too; Amtrak and (to a lesser extent) Greyhound have similar issues. And Metro North (the commuter rail to the suburbs north of New York City) charges a bit more for certain tickets when bought at the station, vs. those bought on-line.

I think in this case, Max responded before I had had a chance to finish my post with all the information on regional passes and point-point tickets. Yes, if you try to take the fastest express trains and buses with discount tickets, you'll take less time but have to build in slack since the tickets are non-refundable. On the other hand, regional passes are completely flexible, just use slower trains, but you can leave as soon as you arrive. Or, you can use full fare tickets on express trains, leave as soon as you get there, just pay more.