Munich, Nuremberg or Memmingen: arriving in Bavaria

Munich is the international hub — a long-haul connecting airport with two terminals, a midfield satellite and a large transfer population. It is the natural arrival for the city, the lakes and the eastern Alps, and the only one of the three with a serious intercontinental network.

Nuremberg is the gateway to Franconia. Erlangen, Fürth, Bamberg and Würzburg are all closer to it than to Munich, and Franconia’s industry and universities sit in those towns rather than in one centre — Siemens Healthineers at Erlangen alone generates a steady business flow. At 5 km out with one arrivals hall, it is also by far the easiest of the three to arrive at.

Memmingen is the Allgäu and the western Alps. Füssen and Neuschwanstein, Oberstdorf, Lake Constance and the Austrian border are all closer to that terminal than Munich is. It is a converted military field with one terminal, no jet bridges, and a schedule set by Ryanair and Wizz Air.

The error worth avoiding is treating Memmingen as a cheap Munich. If Munich really is your destination, the coach takes well over an hour and is priced per passenger, and the saving on the flight can disappear entirely for a family of four before you count the two hours.

There is a timing dimension too. Low-cost schedules put a lot of Memmingen arrivals late in the evening, when the regional buses in the Allgäu have finished for the day — so the fallback plan you were relying on may not exist at the hour you land.

If the Allgäu or the Alps are your destination, the ranking inverts completely. Memmingen is the closest airport and Munich is the detour, by a wide margin: a skier heading for Oberstdorf or a family going to Neuschwanstein is much better served landing here than driving south from Munich for two hours.

Bavaria is the largest German state by area and much of what people come for is rural. The Alps, the lakes, the Romantic Road, Franconian Switzerland, the Allgäu, the wine country around Würzburg — none of these is a Hauptbahnhof, and most of the accommodation in them is a village address.

That matters because it inverts the usual advice. In a dense state like NRW the question is which of six airports is nearest; in Bavaria the question is more often how you get from a good airport to a place with four buses a day.

The industrial geography does the same thing. Bavaria’s manufacturing sits in Ingolstadt, Regensburg, Erlangen, Augsburg and dozens of smaller towns, not in central Munich — so a great deal of business travel here also ends somewhere the S-Bahn does not go.

For central Munich and central Nuremberg, public transport is genuinely good and we say so on both airport pages. The S-Bahn runs from under Munich Airport into the city, and the U2 reaches Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof in about twelve minutes from beneath the terminal.

The Nuremberg case is the strongest in the whole network: twelve minutes, from directly under the arrivals hall, at a fraction of any car fare. There is no honest argument for a transfer on that specific journey and we do not make one.

Munich’s S-Bahn is slower — the better part of three quarters of an hour — but it is completely predictable, which the A9 in the morning peak is not. What none of the three airports does well is the countryside, and in a state this large most Bavarian destinations are countryside.