Stuttgart and Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden: the two airports for the south-west

Stuttgart Airport is 13 km from the centre and has an S-Bahn running from under the terminals. Because the city sits in a basin and the road descends into it, the train is frequently faster than driving — and during a trade fair week it is not close. That is the honest position and it is on the airport page too.

The exhibition grounds are the exception that proves the rule, because they are directly beside the airport rather than in the city. A visitor to Messe Stuttgart is already there on landing, which is unusual in Germany and worth knowing before booking a hotel in the centre and commuting back out.

What a car is for at Stuttgart is the region, and the region is the point. Böblingen and Sindelfingen are Mercedes-Benz; Ludwigsburg, Reutlingen, Tübingen and Heilbronn are all short on a map and long by rail, because the Swabian topography does not lend itself to straight lines. Reutlingen is 28 km, Pforzheim 52, Heilbronn 75, Karlsruhe 81 and Ulm 84. An industrial park is not a station, and a great deal of this region's business traffic ends at one.

The longer runs are real too. Stuttgart Airport to Zürich is 220 km, and to Freiburg im Breisgau 208 — both journeys where the ICE is worth considering and where a group with luggage usually is not better off on it.

The airport is at Rheinmünster, roughly 12 km from Baden-Baden and about 42 from Karlsruhe — so the city listed second in the name is the one it is actually near, and the larger city is the further away. It is one of four airports in this network whose name points somewhere it is not, and we wrote a guide about that specifically.

Once you stop reading the name as a location, the position is excellent. The Black Forest starts immediately to the east. The Ortenau wine villages are on the doorstep. Baden-Baden itself is a spa town with a season, a casino and a concert hall. And the Rhine is close enough that France is a short drive: Strasbourg is 63 km — closer than Stuttgart — with its own station transfer for onward TGV connections.

The rest of the useful map: Karlsruhe 42 km, Pforzheim 62, Heidelberg 91, Mannheim 105, Freiburg 106, Stuttgart 109 and Basel 163. Messe Karlsruhe is 36 km and is a routine booking during its events.

The airport does run a shuttle bus that meets flights and serves Baden-Baden station and central Karlsruhe, and if you are travelling alone or as a couple with hand luggage to either of those, take it — it is much cheaper than a car. What it cannot do is the reason most people fly here: the Black Forest valleys, the spa hotels, the wine villages and anything across the Rhine have no scheduled connection at all. And a late arrival on a low-cost schedule can meet a rail service that has already finished for the evening.

Fly to Stuttgart for business in the Neckar valley and the car industry, for Messe Stuttgart, for Ulm and the Swabian Alb, and whenever the flight network matters — it has far more destinations and far more frequency.

Fly to Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden for the Black Forest, the spa towns, the Ortenau and Kaiserstuhl wine country, Alsace and Strasbourg, and for the Rhine plain generally. It is also simply closer to Heidelberg and Mannheim than Stuttgart is, which surprises people.

The two are 109 km apart by road, so switching between them is a real option rather than a theoretical one — and with low-cost fares into Baden-Baden and full-service fares into Stuttgart, the combination is often what makes a trip work.

One planning note that catches people out in both directions: this region is close to three borders. Basel, Strasbourg and Zürich are all inside a comfortable drive, and a fixed-price transfer across a border removes the question of whether a taxi meter or an app will behave sensibly on an international leg. It is the same argument as the Alps from Munich and Memmingen, on a different frontier.

Baden-Württemberg is hilly, and hills are why a short distance here is often a long journey. The Swabian Alb, the Black Forest and the Neckar valley all force roads and railways to follow contours rather than straight lines, and the effect on a rail timetable is a change, then another change, then a bus.

That is the structural reason a car earns its price here more often than in flatter regions. It is not that the trains are bad — the S-Bahn at Stuttgart is genuinely good and we say so. It is that the destinations are dispersed: a spa hotel in a valley, a supplier's plant on a ring road, a winery on a hillside. None of those is a station, and the last leg from the station is the part nobody plans for.

The other structural fact is the flying schedule. Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden is a low-cost airport, which means a meaningful share of its traffic lands early, late, or both, by design rather than by accident — the aircraft are cheaper to fly at those hours. A transfer booked in advance is unaffected by that; a rail connection is not.