In France, Spain, and Italy the government hands out the hotel stars. Here it does not.
That single difference explains most of what confuses visitors about German hotels, and it’s worth five minutes before you book anything.
What the Stars Actually Mean
German stars come from the hotel and restaurant trade association. A house applies, pays a fee, and gets inspected against a long list of criteria. The rating then holds for a few years before the next check. Nobody is forced to take part.
Around 6,000 hotels are currently rated. More than half of them carry three stars. Barely a hundred in the whole country hold five.
So three stars isn’t a warning. Three stars is the middle of the road, and the middle of the road here is clean, quiet, and perfectly fine.
Two things to watch for. A rating with Superior attached means the house scored well above its category without quite reaching the next one. A three-star Superior often beats a plain four. And a hotel with no stars at all hasn’t failed anything. It simply never applied, which is common among small family houses that see no point in paying for a plaque.
What you may not see is a house awarding itself stars. That has been litigated, and the trade association won.
Hotel, Gasthof, Pension
The word on the sign tells you more than the stars do.
A Hotel garni serves breakfast and nothing else. No restaurant, no dinner, no room service. This isn’t a downgrade, it’s a business model, and garni houses are often the best value in a city center.
A Gasthof is an inn: a restaurant on the ground floor with rooms above it. The restaurant is usually the main business and the rooms came later. In a village this is frequently the only place to sleep, and the food is frequently the reason to stay.
A Pension or Gästehaus is a guesthouse, often somebody’s own building, often run by the family that lives in it. Fewer services, more conversation at breakfast.
Then there are two words that hang on houses which aren’t hotels at all. Zimmer frei means rooms available. Belegt means full.
An American friend of mine drove through the Alps years ago and came back struck by how many of those signs he had passed. He was right. It’s the sort of thing you stop seeing once you’ve grown up with it.
In tourist regions a lot of ordinary households rent out two or three rooms on the side. Alpine valleys, the Black Forest, both coasts, the wine towns. Less a trade than a second income, and in some villages a dozen of them sit in a row on the same street.
Officially they barely exist. The national overnight statistics only count places with ten beds or more. Most of these houses have never turned up in a single published figure.
Most are on no booking site either. You ring the bell, and the sign gets turned around when the last room goes. That’s the whole procedure, and it’s the last corner of German lodging where showing up unannounced still works.
Bring cash, though. And the registration rules further down apply here too.
Chains fill the predictable end. Motel One is the German one worth knowing, founded in Munich in 2000, small rooms and a good bar at a low price. B&B Hotels covers the value segment. Ibis, Holiday Inn, and Hilton do what they do everywhere. IntercityHotel is exactly what the name promises: the national railway set it up in the 1980s and put the houses next to the stations.
Then there’s Steigenberger, which is the grand old German name. Albert Steigenberger bought his first house in Baden-Baden in 1930. The group was sold to Egyptian owners in 2009 and to a Chinese group in 2020. In 2024 the parent company dropped the name Deutsche Hospitality altogether.
The hotels are still the same hotels. But if anybody tells you German hospitality is a closed shop, that’s the counterexample. ;-)
What the Room Will Be Like
Smaller than at home. That’s the honest summary, and it applies to the bathroom twice over.
The bed needs explaining. A German double is one frame holding two separate mattresses, each usually 90 cm (35 in) wide, with a duvet each. If you want one continuous mattress, ask for a französisches Bett, which is a double bed built for two. Ask when you book, not at the desk. A third person almost always means a folding bed and a surcharge, not a second double.
Air conditioning is the complaint that comes up more than any other, and the reason isn’t stinginess. We barely cool anything in this country. Roughly 6 percent of German households have any cooling at all, against about 20 percent across Europe and over 90 in the United States. The buildings were designed for cold winters, the summers used to be short, and the habit simply never formed.
What you get instead is a window that tilts open at the top, and an external roller shutter you can close against the afternoon sun. Both work better than they sound. But if you’re coming in July and you want cold air, filter for it when you book. Do not assume.
A few smaller things. Older buildings often have no elevator, and four flights with a suitcase is a real possibility, so ask if that matters to you. Washcloths are rarely provided. Sockets take two round pins and 230 volts, so American electronics need an adapter and sometimes more than that.
What You Pay For
Breakfast is the big variable. Many houses include it, plenty of city hotels charge separately, and the difference between the two isn’t small. Check the rate before you compare prices, because a room that looks cheaper often isn’t.
When it’s included, it earns its place. A German hotel breakfast is a spread rather than a plate: bread rolls, cold cuts, cheese, boiled eggs, quark, fruit, and coffee that keeps coming. Eat properly and you can skip lunch, which is a real saving on a long day out.
The visitor levy is the other line on the bill. Most towns that live off tourism charge one, and it’s usually settled at the desk rather than online. I go into it on the Germany vacation page.
Prices themselves swing more by calendar than by category. A three-star room in Munich or Frankfurt costs what a four-star room costs in Saxony. Sunday nights in business cities are cheap, because the expense accounts have gone home. And when a big trade fair is in town, rates in Hanover, Frankfurt, and Cologne go somewhere that has to be seen to be believed. Check the fair calendar before you fix your dates, not after.
And a quiet tip, since I’m not going to print numbers that go stale. Want to know what a room actually costs this week? Run a search on my hotel page. Live rates beat any figure I could type here.
Checking In
Here’s the one thing the travel blogs are getting wrong right now, and it matters to you specifically.
Germany abolished the hotel registration form in January 2025. For German citizens. Everyone else still fills one in.
So if you hold a foreign passport, nothing has changed. You show a valid passport on the day you arrive, and you sign a Meldeschein by hand. Hotel, guesthouse, or the spare room over somebody’s garage: the size of the place changes nothing. The hotel keeps it on file for a year. This comes out of the Schengen rules, so no front desk can waive it for you, and a machine can’t do it either.
Practical consequence: keep the passport where you can reach it. Not at the bottom of the suitcase you just watched disappear into a luggage room. :-)
One more habit worth knowing. Small hotels and guesthouses don’t staff the desk around the clock. If your train gets in at eleven at night, send a message that morning. Somebody will wait up, or leave a key box code, or tell you the door code. What they cannot do is guess.
The pattern behind all of this is the same one. German hotels are built for people who booked a specific room for a specific reason, not for people who walk in and improvise. Say what you need in advance and you’ll get it. Turn up hoping, and you get whatever was left.
Every town on this site has its own hotel listing, from Heidelberg down to places you’ve never heard of. If you already know where you’re going, start from the city and town index. If a hotel isn’t what you’re after, there are hostels, holiday homes, resorts, and campgrounds.