A Ferienwohnung is a holiday apartment. A Ferienhaus is a whole house. Both come with a kitchen, both come with a washing machine, and both are rented by the week far more often than by the night.
That last part is the real difference. A hotel sells you a room. A holiday rental sells you an address.
By day three the woman at the bakery knows what you want before you say it. That’s worth more than a lobby, and it’s the reason to consider one for anything longer than a weekend.
Where the Supply Actually Is
Start with the geography, because it saves a lot of fruitless searching.
Holiday rentals in Germany are a rural and coastal business. The Baltic and North Sea coasts, the Alps, the Black Forest, the wine valleys and the lake districts are full of them. Whole villages run on the trade.
The big cities are a different story. Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg all restrict short-term letting, because every apartment rented to tourists is one that somebody can’t live in. Renting a flat to visitors in those cities needs official permission, and the city checks.
Since 2026 the listing itself has to carry a registration number. If you’re looking at a city apartment and the number is missing, walk away. That listing has a problem, and the problem can become yours at the door.
So in a German city, a hotel is usually the simpler answer. On the coast or in the mountains, the holiday rental is the obvious one.
The Other Star System
Germany rates holiday rentals with stars, and it’s a completely separate system from the hotel one. You can tell them apart by counting the points.
Hotel stars have five points and come from the hotel trade association. Holiday rental stars have eight, and they come from the German Tourism Association, which has been running the scheme since 1994. Around 24,000 properties carry them. It’s voluntary, an inspector visits in person, roughly 90 criteria get checked, and the rating lasts three years.
Here’s the part that matters when you book.
Three stars gets you a flat-screen TV, free wifi, and an oven. Beds made up on arrival and a dishwasher start at four. So if you’re looking at a two or three star place, settle the bed linen question before you travel rather than after.
The scheme covers anything up to nine beds. Since 2022 that includes tiny houses, houseboats, and treehouses. Somebody out there is running a five-star shipping container. :-)
What the Headline Price Leaves Out
This is where visitors get caught, and it has nothing to do with anybody being sneaky. German holiday rentals price the stay and the extras separately, and the extras are listed further down the page.
The big one is the Endreinigung, the end-of-stay cleaning fee. It’s charged once per booking, regardless of how many nights you stay. Over two weeks that’s a rounding error. Over two nights it’s a real cost.
Then the linen package. Bed sheets and towels are often an add-on, priced per person, and sometimes the alternative is bringing your own. Nobody assumes a guest arrives empty-handed here.
After that: the visitor levy, which I cover on the Germany vacation page. Electricity billed by meter reading on longer stays. Parking. A pet fee if the dog comes along.
None of it is hidden. All of it is easy to skip past when you’re comparing two listings on price. Add the extras to both before you decide, and the cheaper one sometimes changes.
You Pay for the Cleaning and Clean Anyway
This one surprises visitors more than anything else on the list. So, plainly: paying the cleaning fee does not mean you walk out and leave it.
The expected standard is besenrein, broom-clean. You strip the beds and leave the linen where the owner asked. You load the dishwasher and start it. You take out the trash, sorted, and you wipe down anything obvious.
The fee covers the bathroom, the kitchen, and the floors. The rest is on you.
Which brings up the sorting. Every German rental has separate bins, and they’re labeled. Paper in one, packaging in another, glass by color at the collection point down the street, food waste in the brown one. The owner will leave a note about which day the bins go out.
Get this wrong and nobody shouts at you. But an owner who finds a week of unsorted trash has to sort it themselves, and word travels in a village.
The House Has Rules
Nearly every rental comes with a Hausordnung, a house rulebook, usually a laminated sheet on the kitchen wall. Read it. It’s short, and it tells you things the listing left out.
Quiet hours are the important part. Night quiet runs from ten in the evening until six or seven in the morning, and it is a real convention rather than a suggestion. Sundays and public holidays are quiet all day. Some towns add a midday quiet period as well.
That means no lawnmower on Sunday, no drilling, and no music on the terrace at midnight. In an apartment building, the neighbors are people who live there year round.
One more thing that catches people out at booking time. In holiday regions the changeover day is often fixed, and it’s usually Saturday. Arriving on a Tuesday for five nights may simply be impossible in August, whatever the calendar on the site suggests.
Check-out tends to be between ten and eleven in the morning and check-in from three or four in the afternoon. That gap is the cleaning window, and it’s tight when somebody leaves and somebody else arrives the same day.
Getting the Key
Small operations still hand over keys in person. Somebody meets you, shows you the boiler, explains the bins, and asks how long you’re staying. It takes fifteen minutes and it’s usually the most useful quarter of an hour of the whole trip. ;-)
So tell them your arrival time and stick to it. If the train runs late, send a message.
And bring your passport. The registration form applies here exactly as it does in a hotel, and the size of the operation changes nothing about that.
Every major holiday region on this site has its own rental listing, from the Baltic coast to the Black Forest. The full set covers most of the country. If a rental turns out to be the wrong fit, there are hostels, resorts, and campgrounds too.