From the gate to the city centre at all nineteen German airports

The spread is much wider than most people expect, and it is the first thing worth knowing. Bremen sits about 3.5 km from its own city centre — you can see the city from the apron. Nuremberg is about 5 km, Düsseldorf and Hamburg about 8, Dresden 9, Dortmund 10, Hannover 11, Frankfurt and Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden 12, Stuttgart 13, Cologne Bonn 15, Berlin Brandenburg 18, Paderborn Lippstadt 18, Leipzig/Halle 20, Münster Osnabrück 25 and Munich 28.5.

That range — roughly 3.5 km to 28.5 km — is the whole argument. At Bremen the airport is effectively a city tram stop that happens to have aircraft. At Munich you are half an hour of motorway from Marienplatz before traffic is considered. Treating those two as the same kind of journey is how people end up either overpaying for a three-kilometre hop or badly underestimating a thirty-kilometre one.

Road distance and centre distance are not the same number either. Munich Airport is 28.5 km from the city as the registry measures it, but the road route to München Hauptbahnhof is 39 km, because the A92 does not run in a straight line to the middle of Munich. Frankfurt is 12 km out and 17 km by road to the Hauptbahnhof. Always read the road figure, which is what any driver and any meter is working from.

Several of these airports have a rail or tram connection good enough that recommending a car for one person with hand luggage would be dishonest. We say so on each airport page, and it is worth collecting in one place.

Bremen is the clearest case in Germany: tram 6 stops outside the door, runs every six to ten minutes and is in the centre in about eleven minutes. Nuremberg is nearly as good — the U2 covers the twelve minutes from under the terminal to the Hauptbahnhof. Dresden has the S2 running every half hour from directly beneath the building. Frankfurt has a regional station under Terminal 1 and reaches the Hauptbahnhof in about ten minutes. Hamburg has the S1 at about twenty-five minutes, Hannover an S-Bahn at about twenty, Munich the S-Bahn from under the terminals, Stuttgart likewise, and Berlin the Flughafenexpress.

Düsseldorf, Cologne Bonn and Leipzig/Halle all have their own stations with frequent services into their respective centres. In each of those cases, if you are one person with a cabin bag going to a main station in daylight, take the train. That advice is on every one of those airport pages and it is not going to change.

This is deliberate, and it is worth being plain about why. A company that recommends a car for a twelve-minute U-Bahn ride is a company whose recommendations are worthless on the journeys that genuinely need one. Being useful on the easy question is what makes the hard one credible.

The train advice holds for a specific traveller: one person, hand luggage, daylight, going to a main station. Change any one of those four and the arithmetic moves, sometimes decisively.

Group size. Rail is priced per passenger and a car is priced per vehicle. At two the gap narrows; at three or four it usually closes entirely, and it does so before you have counted the convenience. This is the single most common reason the honest answer flips, and it is pure arithmetic rather than salesmanship.

Luggage. A suitcase per person changes a twelve-minute tram ride into a twelve-minute tram ride with a problem at both ends — the platform, the change, the stairs, the last few hundred metres to the door. Ski and golf luggage make it worse. So do pushchairs and child seats, which no public network provides.

The hour. A great many of these airports run schedules that fall outside the useful part of the timetable, and at the regional ones this is by design rather than by accident. Dortmund runs 05:00 departures and after-midnight arrivals. Cologne Bonn specialises in overnight freight-shaped movements. Leipzig/Halle has a genuinely empty station in the small hours. At those times the comparison is not train against car, it is car against waiting.

The address. This is the one people underestimate most. Every recommendation above ends at a Hauptbahnhof, and almost nobody is going to a Hauptbahnhof — they are going to a hotel, a village, a business park or a house. The last leg is where a good rail connection stops being a good journey, and it is the leg a private car simply does not have.

Four airports in this network are named after a city they are nowhere near, and for those the phrase "airport to city centre" quietly means something else. Frankfurt-Hahn is about 120 km from Frankfurt. Memmingen is sold against Munich at over a hundred. Weeze was marketed as Düsseldorf until a court stopped it, and Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden puts the more distant of its two cities first. We wrote a separate guide about exactly this, because the gap is large enough to change what you should do when you land.

The useful move at those four is to stop asking about the name city and ask about your actual destination. From Memmingen, the run to Munich is 118 km and there is a coach that does it per passenger — take the coach if you are alone and unhurried. But most people landing there are going to the Allgäu, the Alps or Lake Constance, and for those there is no scheduled service to compare against at all.

The same shape applies at the smaller regional airports even when the name is honest. Münster Osnabrück is 25 km from Münster and the bus into town is the sensible choice when the timetable lines up with your landing — but the Münsterland itself, the villages and the moated houses and the farm hotels, has nothing to compare against. Paderborn Lippstadt is the same for the Sauerland. At a regional airport the phrase "if the timetable lines up" is doing a great deal of work.

Not speed. On most of these journeys a car is not meaningfully faster than the train, and on a few — Frankfurt to Cologne, Stuttgart in a trade fair week, Munich on the A9 at eight in the morning — the train is comfortably quicker. Anyone selling you a car on time alone is selling you something they cannot deliver.

What it buys is the elimination of the two ends. The driver is inside the terminal with your name, the luggage goes in the boot rather than up a staircase, and the journey finishes at the address rather than at a station a further tram ride from it. On an arrival at the end of a long flight, with children or with real luggage, those two ends are most of the difficulty of the trip.

It also buys a price that was agreed before you travelled. The fixed fare on every route page is what you pay — it does not move with traffic, with the hour, or with how many other people landed at the same time. That matters most at exactly the hours when the alternative has stopped running.

If you want to see what any of this costs on your own journey, the route pages carry the fixed price for each leg — Frankfurt Airport to the Hauptbahnhof, Berlin Brandenburg into Berlin, Stuttgart into Stuttgart, Bremen into Bremen, Dresden into Dresden, Nuremberg into Nuremberg, Leipzig/Halle into Leipzig and Münster Osnabrück into Münster. Every airport hub page carries the same honest comparison for its own city.