[Ggflash]

25 September 2020 at 1:57:51 #825700

My wife and I want to visit Switzerland enjoying not only the cities and towns, but partaking of as many lake cruises, as possible. Our thought is to create an itinerary that would take us through a town to a lake; take a lake cruise; overnight at the end of that cruise; enjoy the next town, then go through to the next lake; take a lake cruise; etc. etc. In this way, we hope to enjoy not only the land, but the water experiences, as well.

Has anyone heard of such an itinerary and/or where we might go to find such a linked itinerary? I imagine we can “make it up” ourselves using the MySwissAlps “Scenic Boat Trips in Switzerland” listing, but we are hoping for some experienced insights into such a trip.

Thanks …. in advance.

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[Anna]

25 September 2020 at 5:42:10 #934338

Hi Ggflash,

Welcome to MySwissAlps.

If you are interested in a scenic lake cruise combined with a panoramic train ride, I would recommend taking the Gotthard Panorama Express from Lucerne to Lugano. Details of this scenic route are explained here: http://www.myswissalps.com/gotthardpanoramaexpress

And then in Lugano, you can partake in another lake cruise. There are a few options listed here: http://www.myswissalps.com/boatlakelugano
My favourite is the one that goes around the lake. If you have time, you can travel to Locarno on the train and do another lake cruise on Lake Maggiore.

Additionally, depending where your point of entry is and how much time you have on this trip, you could also perhaps include boat trips on Lake Zurich or Lake Geneva ahead of your journey to Lucerne. Also, the lake cruises around Lake Lucerne offer some of the best views so you might want to include those too.

Hope this gives you some ideas on how to plan your itinerary.

Regards,

Anna

[Shroffchetan]

25 September 2020 at 10:54:25 #934339

Such a romantic way of spending your vacation

Unfortunately in Switzerland there are many large lakes but they are not interconnected. But lake regions are very close. There are many long circular boat routes. For example you can go from Lucerne to Brienz and From Brienz to Interlaken you can come by boat. From Interlaken to Thun you can go by boat. In Lugano, you can travel to Gandria or lake geneva is a big region and you can hop many boats from montreux to Geneva

I feel this will work out great. In fact you can evaluate combining scenic train and boat journeys together

[Shroffchetan]

25 September 2020 at 10:55:14 #934340

One more thing think of Swiss Travel Pass which includes train and boat journeys together

[Removed user]

30 September 2020 at 22:09:46 #934341

That’s pretty much something you will need to create yourself.

First of all I don’t think your idea really works as you envisage it, because the lakes are nearly all traversable in a few hours – so in most cases it is more convenient to stop at a lakeside town, take a day trip on the lake, then move on to the next lake area. This is best done to avoid having to take large baggage on a boat

The most important starting point is to look at a map of Switzerland and locate the major lakes and the main towns on them, so that you know what place names to use in the planning methods below

There are two ways to do it:

1) a variation on the traditional age old use of a ‘paper’ timetable – ie using fahrplanfelder.ch This has PDFs of all timetables. You put in the name of a place and you get the ‘printed’ timetables for the nearby lakes.

2) use the Swiss online timetable and put in as many ‘vias’ as the system will allow.

Example for method 1) = go to fahrplanfelder.ch and type ‘Neuchatel’ in the place name – you will get Neuchatel (bateau) which is the boat landing stage as opposed to the railway station.

http://www.fahrplanfelder.ch/en/welcome.html?tx_fapch_pi1%5Bsword%5D=%22Neuchâtel%20%28bateau%29%22

Do that for all the other lakes in Switzerland.

Example for method 2:

Say you want to start in Zurich and pull in Lake Zug then Lake Luzern, you should go to the online travel planner and put in origin Zurich, destination Luzern via various places on the lakes in question, whilst also using the option to pick transport mode per journey segment (ie boat when you want to get the lake times not a parallel train)

[Snowman]

2 October 2020 at 20:06:14 #934342

Hi @1960man, thanks for these fantastic links on transport timetables in Switzerland. I was not aware of them, they are just great and sooooo useful!