I am wondering in Germany if there are free wireless internet hot spots. Thanks.

Yeah, in Starbucks - lol

McD and Subway.

And many other places like cafes or pubs with a target audience of under 40
Wifi is often called W-LAN in Germany, and you usually have to ask for the password.

German hotels see wifi as a chance to charge the customer. Has anyone found a free wifi chain yet?

NH has free wifi worldwide
Motel One got free wifi in the lobbies
Smaller, independent hotels are more likely to offer free wifi than the nationwide chains geared at business travellers who get reimbursed thru travel expenses and could not care less about the silly fees.

We have found free wifi at some hotels, mostly independent as Cowboy said. If you use HRS.com to search for hotels, its "Facilities" section on each hotel will tell if it has wifi (Wireless Lan) and the charge. Regards, Gary

Thanks a lot for help.

I think I had free wifi at an Etap/Accor hotel in Berlin, so I'm guessing they do that elsewhere as well.

And you could try
http://www.freie-hotspots.de/en/index.php
http://www.wlanmap.com/regional/deutschland
http://www.hotspot-locations.de/

We had it at a couple of places we stayed in Germany. We used internet cafes in several towns. Not too expensive, depending on what you need to do. There is a different keyboard in Germany.

Some chains actually provide it depending on the level of accommodation you stay in.

We had free wifi in Dresden and Weimar (3 smaller hotels, not part of a mega chain - 1 in Dresden, 2 in Weimar) last year. Annoyingly at one hotel I had to sit in the lobby to access it as it didn't extend to the outer buildings where we stayed. People kept approaching me as they thought I was a staff member, working on my laptop. You did need to ask the password at the front desk.

I think the number of places where you can get wifi is slowly expanding; the year before we stayed in Bremen in an apartment and had to do our own mobile broadband, but now I see that several of the apartments with the same firm now have wifi. It's just slowly becoming part of the norm.

Lavandula