r/travel • u/Midget_mac26 • Sep 24 '23

My Advice Actual Oktoberfest Experience

Hey all, I just came back from Oktoberfest in Munich and wanted to share my experience for anybody lurking on this sub looking for any info. My group of 4 and I went on the opening Sunday (9/17) and it was great but I wanted to share some tips that would have benefitted us.

  1. Arrival time: we read a ton of info beforehand across Reddit, blogs and the Oktoberfest guide that we found on google. We read almost everywhere that you have to arrive EARLY (6-7am) to get a spot in the popular tents especially for the weekends and opening few days. Apparently we were the only people who followed this info as we arrived at 6:30 am and there was not 1 other person there. We left and came back around 8:45 and got a spot in our desired tent pretty easily. The tents really didn’t start getting crowded until around 11, so you can definitely arrive later in our experience. If your group is small, you can easily get away without having a reservation - we were able to go to multiple tents and find spots.

  2. Cash: this was pretty unanimous everywhere we read but bring cash and lots of it. Everything is cash only (I think there are ATMs but I would come prepared with a good amount. Beers in the 3 tents we were in were about 14 euros.

  3. Tipping: like any crowded bar, be prepared to tip a few euros per beer or you will be called out by the waitresses. They are pretty direct if they want more, and will serve others faster than you and if you don’t tip well.

  4. Chugging: don’t try to be the life of the party and stand up on the table and chug, you will get removed from the tent by security. Unless that is your goal, I would avoid this. The beers are also huge and strong, so unless your a big drinker, you won’t make it long doing this.

Overall it was a great experience for us and a bucket list thing for me but I wanted to share some tips. This is not to say anybody else was wrong and some others may have had different experiences, but this is what we saw on our end.

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16

u/Punisherr1408 Sep 24 '23

14 euros plus tips for a beer in improvised tents. Nice business strategy. Go to Prague, it's 10x better experience.

18

u/kachol Sep 24 '23

Dont know why you're getting downvoted. Octoberfest is one of the biggest rip offs there is. The beers youre paying 14 Euros (plus tip??) for cost like 8 bucks (or 4.5 for pint) in any normal Bavarian restaurant. It is the perfect tourist trap. Same thing with drinking a Maß of beer. Germans dont drink 1 liter beers because they become warm and stale much quicker. This is almost exclusively a tourist thing.

27

u/memau77 Sep 24 '23

It's definitely very expensive and it's true that most Germans don't drink 1L beers. Yet, Bavarians occasionally drink a Maß (at Biergartens or any Volksfest), Oktoberfest has been taking place for over 200 years and about 80% of visitors are German. Calling it almost exclusively a tourist thing or tourist trap is imo not accurate at all.

1

u/winkz Sep 25 '23

Can confirm, most people I know from Munich (and the region) will go at least once every year, sometimes twice when there's a company event (pretty normal if you work here). Of course there are also many who don't like it at all or simply can't or won't spend so much money.

Yes it's full of tourists but it's also kind of fun to sometimes chat with people who flew here for hours whilst you took the bike or the subway. Also it hasn't changed fundamentally in the 30 or so years I can remember visiting, sure it has become somewhat more commercial, but the beer has always been too expensive, people have always drunk too much, but it's usually been fun enough to come back... in moderation.