What to know before travelling around Germany

Who comes and how much of it is domestic

Germany welcomed 37.1 million international tourists in 2025, down 0.8% on 2024, and international arrivals remain below their 2019 level. The three largest source markets were the Netherlands at 14.0%, Switzerland at 8.6% and the United States at 8.5%, so two of the top three are immediate neighbours.

Domestic travel is where the volume is, and it has recovered fully. Commercial accommodation recorded 149.7 million domestic overnight visitors in 2025, 1.6% above 2024 and at record levels. That is roughly four domestic visitors for every international one, and it explains why German tourism feels different from the Mediterranean model: the industry serves Germans first and foreigners second.

Tourism directly contributed 122.3 billion euros to the economy in 2022, 3.1% of output, employing 1.9 million people, and travel exports accounted for 8.5% of total service exports in 2024. Industry estimates put the sector at 3.7% of gross value added in 2024 with 2.7 million employed.

Where Germans actually go

The most visited tourist regions are not the famous cities. They are the East Frisian and North Frisian islands, the Baltic coasts of Holstein, Mecklenburg and Vorpommern, the Rhine valley, the Bavarian Forest and the Black Forest, and the Bavarian Alps. Coast and forest, in other words, rather than museums.

The state figures show where the volume sits. Germany recorded 459 million visitor nights in 2017, of which 83 million were foreign guests. Bavaria alone accounted for 94.3 million nights in hotels, hostels and clinics that year. Relative to population the Baltic coast is denser: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern recorded 18.4 nights per inhabitant against a German average of 5.5.

The spa towns are the part of the pattern outsiders miss entirely. About 242 million nights, two thirds of all hotel nights in Germany, are spent in spa towns, many of them established at a hot spring and offering the Kur, a course of convalescent or preventive treatment using mineral water and other therapies. German health tourism is a mass activity supported by the health system rather than a luxury sector.

What the cities are each for

Germany has no single city that stands for the country, and treating the largest five as interchangeable is the commonest planning mistake a visitor makes.

Berlin is the capital again and the least typical German city: poorer than the national average and rebuilt in visible layers, and the centre of the contemporary music and art scene that grew after 1989. It is where a visitor goes for the twentieth century and for what came after it.

Munich is the Bavarian capital and the wealthiest of the large cities, the base for the Alps and the Oktoberfest, and it is conservative in a way Berlin finds funny. Hamburg is a port and a merchant city on the North Sea trade routes, with the water and the brick warehouses that go with it. Cologne has the cathedral inscribed in 1996 and a carnival that stops the city, and Frankfurt is the financial centre and the airport most long-haul visitors actually arrive at.

Behind them sit the cities that carry the culture. Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar, Nuremberg, Heidelberg, Freiburg and a long list of others each hold institutions out of proportion to their size, for the historical reason that they were capitals. A trip built around three of those instead of two of the largest five is usually the better trip.

What the visitors say they come for

The national tourist board's own surveys give the reasons people holiday in Germany, and they are worth reading in order: culture at 75%, outdoors and countryside at 59%, cities at 59%, cleanliness at 47%, security at 41% and modernity behind them.

That ordering explains the shape of a German itinerary better than any list of attractions. Culture in this context means the density of it, dispersed across a country whose small cities each hold institutions built when they were capitals of something. A visitor prepared to go to towns rather than to five cities gets considerably more out of Germany than one who is not.

The recurring events draw internationally in their own right. The Munich Oktoberfest and the Christmas markets held in towns and cities through Advent are the two German traditions most exported, and business tourism is a genuine third component, since Germany hosts major international trade fairs and the ITB Berlin is the leading tourism trade fair.

Germany has been a destination for a long time. From the late eighteenth century Dresden, Munich, Weimar and Berlin were stops on the European Grand Tour, so the country's tourism is older than the country.

What the weather does

The climate is temperate and marine in the west and humid continental in the east, with cool winters in the west and cold winters in the east, moderate rainfall year-round, and mostly overcast skies from November to February. Summers are warm, more so in the south.

The variation is both north to south and west to east. Germany spans almost eight degrees of latitude, about 889 kilometres, between Sylt in the north and the Bavarian Alps in the south, which shows most in summer temperatures. The west to east gradient exists because north-western Germany is flat and open to humid westerly winds off the Atlantic, while the east is further from that influence.

The centre and south sit in a transitional zone between oceanic and continental. Winters there are cool and summers warm, and maximum temperatures can exceed 30 °C for several days in a row during heat waves.

The practical conclusion is that May to September is the reliable window, that the November to February overcast is a real consideration for a trip built around walking or scenery, and that the Christmas markets are the one thing worth travelling for in the darkest part of the year.

What to see beyond the obvious

The World Heritage list has 55 entries, 52 cultural and 3 natural, and it is a better itinerary than any top ten because the entries are spread across the whole country.

Aachen Cathedral, inscribed in 1978, was among the first sites listed anywhere. Cologne Cathedral followed in 1996. Quedlinburg's collegiate church, castle and old town, inscribed in 1994, and the abbey at Lorsch, inscribed in 1991, are the medieval record, and the Carolingian Westwork at Corvey, inscribed in 2014, and the Hedeby and Danevirke border complex, inscribed in 2018, take it earlier still.

Classical Weimar, inscribed in 1998, is the small ducal capital where Goethe and Schiller worked. The castles of Augustusburg and Falkenlust at Brühl, inscribed in 1984, and the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, inscribed in 2013, are the residences of states that no longer exist. The caves and Ice Age art of the Swabian Jura, inscribed in 2017, hold some of the oldest figurative art known anywhere.

The industrial entries are the ones most worth a detour precisely because nobody expects them. The Erzgebirge mining region, inscribed in 2019, crosses into Czechia, and the Fagus Factory at Alfeld, inscribed in 2011, is an early Gropius building listed as a founding work of modern architecture.

What to eat and where the regions differ

German food is regional to a degree the international caricature does not capture. The sausage, pork and dumpling repertoire is Bavarian and Franconian; the north cooks fish, and Hamburg and the coast run on it; the south-west has a wine culture and a lighter kitchen; and the east has its own dishes that spent forty years developing separately.

The day is traditionally shaped by the saying that a person should breakfast like an emperor, lunch like a king and dine like a beggar. Breakfast is a spread of breads and rolls with jam, honey, cold cuts or cheese, sometimes with a boiled egg, and the main meal was historically at midday, which is why a weekday lunch menu is often the best value a restaurant offers.

Beer is local rather than national. Brewing traditions differ by state and by city, styles are attached to particular towns, and a beer identified with one place is frequently not sold in the next one. Wine is the same: the Rhine, Mosel and Franconian regions each produce distinctly, mostly white, and mostly consumed domestically rather than exported.

The Christmas markets are worth planning a trip around rather than treating as a bonus. They run through Advent in towns and cities across the country, they are the single most exported German tradition after Oktoberfest, and the food and drink at them is seasonal in a way nothing else in the calendar is.

What German rail does well and badly

Rail is extensive and reaches almost everywhere, with high-speed lines linking the major cities and regional services covering the rest. Punctuality on long-distance services is not what the country's reputation implies, and a connection with a short transfer is a risk rather than a plan.

The motorway network is dense and largely toll-free for cars, and sections without a general speed limit remain, though advisory limits and posted limits cover much of the network. Driving is on the right and the vehicle code is D. Many cities operate low-emission zones that require a windscreen sticker, which is worth arranging before arrival rather than at the barrier.

Urban public transport is the part that works best. Cities of any size run integrated networks of underground, tram, urban rail and bus on a single ticket, services are frequent, and regional day tickets covering a whole state exist and are cheap. For a visitor moving between towns rather than between the largest cities, that combination is usually better than a car.

Why Germany still runs on cash

The currency is the euro. Germany has been slower than its neighbours to abandon cash, and although card acceptance has improved considerably, small restaurants, bakeries and market stalls that take cash only are still common enough that carrying some is sensible.

The emergency numbers are 112 for all emergency services and 110 for the police, and both work throughout the country. German sockets take Europlug and Schuko at 230 volts, so continental European appliances work unchanged and British and North American ones need an adapter.

Germany keeps one time zone, an hour ahead of Coordinated Universal Time in winter and two in summer, with the exception of Büsingen, a German enclave inside Switzerland. German is the language, English is widely spoken in cities and in the tourism economy and less so in small towns and in the east, and shop opening hours are more restricted than in most of Europe, with Sunday closing the rule rather than the exception. Germany: culture sets out what the cultural sites actually are and Germany: geography the country they sit in.