Frankfurt Tours, Arrivals and Rhine Day Trips

The airport city, and what that is worth

More international clients enter Germany at Frankfurt than anywhere else, and most leave again within two hours of landing. That is often the right call and it is also a missed evening. Frankfurt is a half-day city done well, and the half-day is better than its reputation: a rebuilt old town, a first-rate picture gallery, the only real high-rise skyline in the country, and apple wine taverns across the river that have not changed in fifty years.

What Frankfurt is not is a place to give three nights on a first Germany trip, and we say so before it is quoted. Its value is as a first night, a last night, or a base for the Rhine and Heidelberg — and as the place where an arrival either goes smoothly or sets the tone for everything after it.

The airport, in the detail that matters

Frankfurt is the largest airport in Germany and a building clients get lost in. Two terminals are in use and a third is under construction. Terminal 1 has its own long-distance station with through ICE services and a separate regional station for the S-Bahn, which reaches the city’s main station in about fifteen minutes. The two are not the same place and clients routinely go to the wrong one.

Meet and greet here is not a courtesy. It is the difference between a tight connection working and not working. Our agent meets the party in the arrivals hall, or at the aircraft door where that has been booked separately, handles the baggage and walks them to the car or the onward gate. What we need is the flight number, the terminal, the party size and a mobile that will be on when the wheels touch.

An old town rebuilt twice

The medieval centre burned in the air raids of March 1944. The Roemerberg, with the stepped gables of the Roemer town hall, went back up in the decades after the war; the quarter between it and the cathedral was rebuilt only recently and opened in 2018, part faithful reconstruction and part new building on the medieval street plan. Clients should be told it is a reconstruction. Told honestly it beats a surviving old town, because the argument over whether to build it ran for thirty years.

Around it: the cathedral where the Holy Roman Emperors were crowned, the Paulskirche where the first freely elected German parliament sat in 1848, and Goethe’s birthplace, also rebuilt, a few streets west.

The Museumsufer and the view

The south bank carries a row of museums within a twenty-minute walk of one another. The Staedel is the serious one, with holdings running from the fourteenth century to the present; beside it are the Liebieghaus for sculpture, the German Architecture Museum, the film museum and the museum of applied art. For a client with one free afternoon and rain outside, this is the answer.

For the skyline, the Main Tower has a public platform around 200 metres up, the only one in the city open to everybody. On a clear evening it shows the Taunus to the north and the Rhine plain to the west, which explains the region faster than a map.

Apple wine, and the trade-fair problem

Across the river in Sachsenhausen the taverns serve Apfelwein poured from a grey-and-blue stoneware jug into a ribbed glass, with hand cheese and green sauce alongside. It is sour, it is local, and roughly half of guests like it. We take clients anyway, because it is the one thing in Frankfurt not trying to be anywhere else.

The trade fairs are the practical constraint on everything. Frankfurt hosts some of the largest fairs in the world, and during them hotel rates multiply and availability disappears months ahead. The Book Fair in October is the best known and not the most disruptive. We check the calendar before confirming any Frankfurt night; when the dates are impossible we base the client in Wiesbaden or the Rheingau and drive in.

What is within an hour

This is where a second night earns itself. Ruedesheim and the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, World Heritage from Bingen down to Koblenz, are an hour west; the classic day puts the party on a boat between Ruedesheim and St. Goar and visits the Marksburg, the only hill castle on the Middle Rhine never destroyed. Heidelberg is an hour south, Wiesbaden and Mainz forty minutes, and the Rheingau growers are close enough that a proper tasting still gets everyone back for dinner. Rothenburg is two and a half hours and belongs on a routing rather than in a day trip.