A bridge on the harbor in Hamburg. Photo by Audrey Sykes.

By Audrey Sykes—

Hamburg, Germany’s great northern maritime city, deserves at least a weekend for exploration. From the moving World War II monuments to a bustling fish market, here’s a rundown on how to spend a cheap but worthwhile weekend in Hamburg.

Friday AM: Boats and beaches of the Elbe River

Cheap boat rides can be found along the Elbe River areas of Altona, Elbstrasse, and Landungsbrücken. They cost as much as a bus ride (about €1.60) and stop at many ideal places for eating, drinking, and sunning on the sandy beaches around the Elbe River. The Alster lake area is another option for organized boat tours.

Friday PM: Watching the St. Pauli Football Team

Snag tickets to one of the most raw, gritty, and hardcore soccer teams in Europe, the St. Pauli Football Team. St. Pauli has it all: a loyal fan base who love to party, sponsors like Hamburg’s signature Astra beer, and a skull-and-crossbones logo. It’s the “Harley Davidson” of European football.

Tickets range from €7-50. Check here for more information. The stadium is located near Feldstrasse, an area rich in World War II monuments, vintage shops, and a Saturday yard sale market.

Saturday AM:  Walking through Sternschanze

Stroll along the hip and bohemian Sternschanze neighborhood for a taste of Hamburg’s café terrace vibe and culture. Streets are lined with interesting boutiques, cheap eats, and bargain bars with a classic décor. A large park, the Planten un Blomen, is nearby – grab an ice cream and do some people-watching in the sun.

Saturday PM: Partying on Reeperbahn

Spend a night out on the Reeperbahn – Hamburg’s main party strip. See the blend of sailor roughness mix with trendy locals at the bars, music venues, clubs, and wurst stands. Beatle-maniacs should try out the nightlife around Grosse Freiheit, the street where the four “mop tops” made their European debut on stage and at parties.

Sunday AM: Stroll through the fish market

A Sunday morning in Hamburg is incomplete without a trip to the lively and exciting Fischmarkt. Located directly on the harbor from Reeperbahn S-bahn station, stroll around the dozens of seafood and produce stands. The market is action-packed with amusing characters and partygoers still out from Saturday night. Stop by anytime between 5 AM to noon.

Sunday PM: Historic Hamburg and the harbor

Spend the rest of Sunday walking along the Elbe River and surrounding harbor. Old harbor vessels permanently dock along the walkway as museums and cafés, and the surrounding area is a historic part of Hamburg undamaged from World War II.

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The town of Lübeck, not far from Hamburg. Photo by lokenrc.

By Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries—

It has become fashionable for minor airports across Europe to seek prominence through association with major cities that are often many miles away. And airlines that serve these minor airports, largely because of their cheaper landing fees, are happy to join in the game.

Exploring Allgäu from “Munich West”

Canny Cheapos know that Germany’s Frankfurt Hahn airport is nowhere near Frankfurt. Likewise, one discount airline has now decided that the name “Memmingen Allgäu” airport just does not have the necessary appeal, so styles the airport “Munich West”—slightly to the surprise of folk locally who are all too well aware that their regional airport is not near Munich at all.

The cachet of a big city name has become important. So much so that it obscures the fact that the communities which lie on the very doorstep of those airports are interesting destinations in themselves. The name “Munich West” is misleading, and hides the fact that the Allgäu region, so close to the airport, is a stunning area of Germany well worth visiting.

Discovering lesser known gems in Germany, Italy, and beyond

Girona Airport. Photo: Lorentey

But as airlines and airports create their own mysterious cartographic realities, sensible travellers exploit these secondary airports to visit spots that really are well served by them.

If you fly to what Wizz Air or Ryanair euphemistically call “Hamburg-Lübeck” airport, you will land a long way from Hamburg but happily very close to Lübeck. The medieval center of one of northern Germany’s most historic and engaging towns is just an eight minute train ride away from the airport (which has its own rail station).

And the same argument holds for other secondary airports across Europe. If you are bound for Barcelona, don’t be seduced by the publicity that suggests that Barcelona Girona Airport is close to Barcelona. It is not! But Girona, just twenty minutes away on the bus, is really worth a visit in its own right. It boasts a particularly well preserved medieval Jewish quarter.

Few of those who jet into Orio al Serio airport near Bergamo, Italy have any intention of visiting Bergamo, just a ten minute bus ride from the airport. No, the airlines market the airport for its rather remote proximity to Milan. Yet Bergamo is an absolute gem, and for first-time visitors to Italy an infinitely better introduction to the country than Milan.

Exploit the system

So does anyone really fly to Frankfurt-Hahn on purpose? Well, they should. The out-of-the-way airport, utterly inconvenient for Frankfurt, is just ten miles east of the most beautiful stretch of Germany’s Moselle Valley.

For those in the know, the wayward cartographic fictions of Europe’s discount airlines throw up a few unusual travel opportunities.

Susanne and Nicky run a Berlin-based editorial bureau that supplies text and images to media across Europe. Together they edit hidden europe magazine. You can read more of their writing in their regular e-brief and in the Notes section on their website.

Popularity: 4% [?]

A Deutsche Bahn train in Berlin's main station. Photo by hidden europe.

By Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries—

Okay, we’ve said it before, but we’ll gladly say it again. Have Cheapos realised just how much rail fares in Europe can vary according to where you purchase your tickets?

We took a day out from our regular work with hidden europe magazine last week and conjured up a tempting palette of trips criss-crossing the continent. And then we compared the ticket prices on a national rail website (that of the Deutsche Bahn) with the prices offered for those journeys by rail ticketing agents based in Britain and North America. We took care to ensure that the tickets we purchased were in every case for exactly the same trains.

So a straight comparison, comparing like-with-like. Same class of travel, same comfy seat, same scenery slipping by outside the window – for all five routes in our basket of European rail trips.

The five routes we tested

1. Berlin to London single (by day, depart after 9:00 AM, any route) on September 3: one adult, 2nd class.
2. Amsterdam to Salzburg single (by day, no more than one change of train) on July 14: one adult, 1st class.
3. London to Cologne via Brussels single (depart at 8:00 AM or later) on September 10: one adult, 2nd class.
4. Berlin to Zagreb single via Hamburg (2 night stop) and Munich (2 night stop) on August 20: one adult, any class.
5. Nuremberg to Dresden same day return (direct trains only) on June 20 for a family of five, 2nd class.

For each of these five journeys, we thought that the German Railways (viz. Deutsche Bahn) website at www.bahn.de would offer some reasonable fare advice, and so it did. Indeed, all five journeys could be booked online through their website.

Then we turned to agents selling rail tickets in North America and Britain to get quotes for precisely the same journeys. This was done first by online research, often followed up by telephone calls to check precise details.

The results

And guess what? The leading agencies specializing in European rail tickets always charged at least twice as much as would the Deutsche Bahn for exactly the same journey.

The key point here is that in most of Europe, rail operators have a whole raft of special promotional fares that massively undercut the regular tariffs (often with discount of more than 80% on the standard fare). But agents rarely offer those discounted fares, preferring to safeguard their hefty commission fees by selling only the full fare.

Comparing the fares

Now take a look at how those fares compared. Listed below are the Deutsche Bahn (DB) fares that were available for purchase around midday of Friday, June 12, 2009 followed by the cheapest fare quoted the same day by a leading North American or British agent (all sterling and dollar fares have been converted to euros just to make things clearer).

1. Berlin to London (2nd class) DB: €49 / Agent Fare: €209
2. Amsterdam to Salzburg (1st class) DB: €79 / Agent Fare: €255
3. London to Cologne (2nd class) DB: €49 / Agent Fare: €106
4. Berlin to Zagreb with stops in Hamburg and Munich (2nd class) DB: €29 / Agent Fare: €322
5. Nuremberg to Dresden day return for family of 5 (2nd class) DB: €37 / Agent Fare: €705

Helpful advice?

We found one leading British agent who was extremely helpful on the phone, going to some lengths to suggest that for certain routes it might be wiser to get the tickets from a German source (but declining to give the specific name of the company or website).

A well-known North American agent emphasized that their dollar fares on offer would undercut anything we might purchase in Europe – a claim which is patently undermined by the results of our survey. The North American agent suggested that a rail pass might be a better bet for some of our journeys, and hinted that we would encounter a range of problems if we attempted to purchase directly from the Deutsche Bahn website.

Booking tickets in advance

The reality is that booking train tickets on www.bahn.de is pretty easy, even without a knowledge of German. The site has a decent English language interface, though in some instances you will find additional functionality on the German language website.

Also, it really helps to have a good knowledge of European patterns of service and railway geography. A good place to start is by studying the latest edition of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable and the same company’s Rail Map of Europe.

Booking well in advance is often the key to finding cheap fares, but our research found that plenty of discounted promotional fares are still available for travel this summer. And we did not cast around trying to dig up the cheapest possible travel dates, having fixed our palette of routes and travel dates before embarking on our research. If you would like the see the full results of our survey, just click here.

And, oh yes, just in case you were wondering, we were paid not a cent by the Deutsche Bahn to publish this!

About the authors: Susanne Kries and Nicky Gardner are regular contributors to EuroCheapo and together edit hidden europe magazine. They live in Berlin.

Popularity: 40% [?]

We were checking out the German tourism office’s new “budget travel” section on their website today and came across their article on saving money on transportation in Germany. Most of the tips were helpful, and included train discounts (for weekend travel), cheap inter-city bus travel, city transportation passes, and even bike programs.

Share your ride!

Sharing a ride. Photo by fragglerawker 03.

The tip that caught our eye, however, was the “Mitfahrzentrale“ shared-ride service, in which automobile drivers traveling between German (and other European) cities offer up seats in their cars. Passengers joining the ride are responsible for paying only their portion of the trip’s expenses (usually covering just gas and tolls).

The car-pooling service is hardly breaking news–it’s been around since 1998 and has 700,000 registered members across Europe. Yet, it’s still not well-known to many non-Europeans.

How it works

Mitfahrzentrale is free to join and registering is a quick process. As a passenger, you simply type in the cities you hope to travel between, a date, and time (if you’re picky). The results display a list of all drivers traveling that route, departure times, how many free seats they have, and any special concerns (smoker, non-smoker, languages spoken, etc.).

The program, unsurprisingly, can cut inter-city transportation to a fraction of the cost of other methods. Beyond budget benefits, sharing a ride has some surprising social perks: Drivers, some of whom make a particular trip very regularly (for example, between Berlin and Hamburg), are able to talk to passengers during the trip, breaking the monotony, while cutting their own costs. Of course, anyone in the car could strike up a potentially long-lasting friendship.

Safety concerns

The system, however, might strike others as a bit risky. After all, who is this driver? And who are these other passengers?

Mitfahrzentrale has thought that through, of course. Passengers initially email or call the driver in order to arrange the pick-up and drop-off details. They then are encouraged to share the driver’s phone number and personal info with others, for a “safety check.”

Also, passengers and drivers may write reviews and testimonials of each other, in order to know whose car you’re about to step into. And finally, users may validate their identity by faxing in a photo-ID, which gives them “safe user” status. (Read more safety information.)

The basic service is free and open to all to join, although a “premium membership” (which costs about €20 a year) allows you to see phone numbers (side-stepping the need to email first).

Tell us what you think.

Have you used Mitfahrzentrale? How was your experience? Would you recommend it to others–and to tourists? If you’ve never used the service, would you consider it? Tell us below!

Popularity: 8% [?]