Germany/Austria at Christmastime - should we make train reservations?
 

Hello, all! We leave in 9 days for Munich and Salzburg - yahooo! A question about train travel... should we consider booking our train tickets ahead of time? We normally wouldn't even consider this, but I'm wondering if the trains will be more crowded this time of year.

Specifically, we'll be traveling these routes in the week between Christmas and New Year's:
- Munich to Salzburg
- Salzburg to Hallstatt and back (this will be a daytrip)
- Salzburg back to Munich
- Munich to Fussen and back (also a daytrip)

Any thoughts on reserving train travel? Thanks!

Meredith

Train tickets cannot sell out. There is no limit concerning the number of tickets sold. A train ticket does not guarantee you a seat, though.

Seat reservations would be recommended on longer trips. On such short distances, however, you'll mostly be travelling on regional and local trains anyway - on these, seat reservations are not possible.
In case you are planning to take an IC/EC train for the Munich-Salzburg legs, a seat reservation makes sense if you travel on one of the peak travel days (Dec 23, for example). This should be done online ASAP. If you travel on the cheaper Bayern Ticket and take local trains, there are no seat reservations.

All the trips you have listed are relatively short distance and it makes no sense to buy tickets other than the Bayernkarte. This is a special fare, available from 9AM to 3AM the next day (and a bit longer on holidays), valid all over Bavaria plus the Munich Salzburg run. Up to 5 persons can travel on the same ticket, for somehing like EUR 27.

You can buy it on the day of departure at the station, from an agent or from a kiosk, where it is EUR 1 less, I believe. The only major limit is that you can only use Regio trains, not IC/EC/ICE trains. But the time difference on these short hauls is only a matter of half an hour. There will be space on the regios you would be taking, especially if you go to the main station (Muenchen Hauptbahnhof)some time before departure. It is a "head station", where they turn the train around, thus the train spends more ttime in station.

As the other writer wrote, there are no seat reservations on Regios.

For all schedules of your plans see ww.bahn.de. It also shows Salzburg - Hallstatt.

is the bayern karte a ticket that works on the s bahn and also the u bahn as well as the trains.

Thanks to quokka and treplow for your very helpful replies!

Gompers, to answer your question, here is what I have found:

"The Bayern Ticket is valid on all non-Intercity trains; in other words, on all RE, RB, IRE trains but not on IC, ICE or EC trains. It is additionally valid on all S-Bahn, U-Bahn, Tram and Bus routes throughout Bavaria, including the MVV in Munich. It is valid on virtually all rural bus services in Bavaria."

Thanks meredith
we take off on saturday,
the whole fam damily is looking forward to the euro adventure.