European travel with a baby: Finding child-friendly hotels in Germany
Written by Amanda Kendle
As you know, I’m in the midst of Europe travel planning for a trip to Germany with my four month old baby, and right now I’m busy with booking some hotels. Luckily, we can stay with family most of the time, but I still need to book a few nights in hotels.
Now I have to admit that in the past, my travel focus has almost always been on budget hotels and backpacker hostels, so this time round I’m a little in the dark about where to stay – perhaps readers can help with me some Europe travel tips on family-friendly hotels you’ve stayed in? So far, my experience in booking hotels in Germany and some tips I’ve already received have led me to consider these key points when finding child-friendly hotels:
- Big chain hotels and smaller pensions both have advantages when you’re looking for kid-friendliness, I think (or it sounds like it as I try to book them) – the larger hotels generally have all the equipment on hand, while the smaller pensions and bed and breakfast style places will go out of their way to help you, even if they don’t have everything immediately available. So take your pick!
- Book directly through the hotel (rather than an agent or booking site) so you can communicate directly with someone who works there about your requirements (a cot, for example, or any other special needs).
- Be clear in emails or telephone calls about any special requirements – I can imagine that turning up to a hotel and having nowhere for my baby to sleep would be quite a problem. I speak German so I have been able to talk to small pensions and hotels in person, but if there is a language barrier it might pay to shop around for hotel staff with good English skills.
- Allow plenty of travelling time between destinations to allow you to check into your hotel at a reasonably early time. This is my plan, anyway! I’m hoping this means that if my baby has a meltdown on the way and it takes us twice as long to get to the next stop, we won’t end up arriving at midnight, plus if we’re able to get there early instead, there’s plenty of time to get set up before the baby’s ready for a bath and bed.
- Look into the restaurant or meal arrangements that might suit children. Obviously, my baby is too young to need this (another reason for the timing of our trip) but if you have toddlers or older children this could be important.
I’d love to hear some more Europe travel tips from readers about their experiences with hotels and children, so please let me know in the comments.
[Photo from Lisa Sunde via Flickr CC]
My tip is to look at vacation rentals as an alternative to hotels. Many in Germany will let by the night and even with a small cleaning surcharge will offer huge advantages over a hotel in terms of space, freedom and flexibility as well as price. No worries about eating outside mealtimes or finding the right foods. Many self catering units offer baby equipment eg steriliser, buggy, toys and bath.
I would also recommend self-catering (this is what we did with our 8 motnh old).
Also if you are at the point of weaning your baby the range of foods in Germany for babies is fantastic (if you are not going down the baby led weaning route of course). In the village where we stayed the 4 ish aisle Schlecker (sort of like Boots but without the pharmacy bit) had almost an entire aisle dedicated to babies with at least half of this for food. The range of organic baby food was amazing – far more choice than in the UK.
I also recommend travelling by train in Germany the big ICE trains have special family compartments in which you can book your seats, including one for your baby at little extra cost (look out for the special family tickets). The compartments consist of a bench round a table with a couple of extra seats behind a small glass divide. It’s about 1.5 times the size of the old 1st BR compartments if not a little bigger – there was enough room to park 2 buggies! We used several of these compartments on our trip. One had a baby changing table that folded down from the wall in it. All were next door to disabled loos (with baby changing facilities) and a few meters from the buffet car. They also contained a power point for a bottle warmer… I must admit we actually used this to watch a DVD whilst Sam was having a nap!
Our entire train journey was 11 hours from Ebbsfleet and with more than half of this in these compartments which we mostly had to ourselves. It made for a very comfortable and at times luxurious feeling trip.
Alice