About this site, and who writes it

Who writes it

I am Korbinian Achleitner, a mountain guide in Oberammergau, Germany. I walk the Ammergau valleys most weeks and I have taken more people up to Linderhof in February — when half of it is shut — than I can count. That is the only qualification this site claims. Where a fact here comes from the Bavarian Palace Administration’s own pages I say so; where it comes from an encyclopedia, or from a listing on a booking platform, or from somebody who wrote a review, I say that instead, because those are four different kinds of evidence and only one of them is the operator of the building.

Two opinions of mine that you should know are opinions. I think the palace is smaller than people expect, and I say so on the pages where it matters rather than letting anybody find out at the door. And I think the valley is the actual reason to come: the park costs nothing, the fountains play through the summer, and the walk up the Graswangtal is better than most of what you will queue for in Bavaria. Neither of those is a fact and neither is dressed up as one.

Four rules this site holds itself to

What a listing crosses out counts as much as what it promises. The booking platform draws inclusions and exclusions in one block, so read as plain running text an exclusion turns into a promise. Every page here was written from both lists, read off the page structure rather than off the text. On this catalogue that is not a fine point: two listings put Linderhof in the itinerary and then say, in their own exclusions, “Admission to Linderhof Palace *usually only an exterior visit”, and two separate listings file a line saying tickets are NOT included inside their INCLUSION lists — t882180 at the second bullet of three, t969207 at the third bullet of three. Editorial policy explains how that is handled and all tours prints every listing’s exclusions so you can check me.

The door price and the platform price are both printed, and never divided into each other. The palace charges about eleven euros. The cheapest listing whose own page offers you a way inside is about seventy-six euros. Those are not the same product and dividing one into the other would invent a number nobody is charging: one is a ticket, the other is a coach seat with a full day’s driving attached. What the difference buys is the journey, and getting there is where that argument is made properly. A reader who takes the bus from Oberammergau and pays at the window has done nothing clever; a reader who books a coach has bought a day, not a ticket.

And the word cheapest gets said carefully, because it means three different things in this catalogue and collapsing them is the easiest mistake on the site. About seventy-one euros is the cheapest listing that names Linderhof at all, and its own exclusions say you stay outside. About seventy-six euros is the cheapest whose page offers you a way in, behind “(if option selected)”. Just under two hundred euros is the cheapest that describes the palace visit with nothing attached. Every page here writes whichever one it means and says which.

A star average never travels without its base. Ten of the eighteen listings that name Linderhof carry fewer than twenty-five ratings and five carry none at all, while one coach holds ninety per cent of every rating in the set. A 5.0 from two ratings and a 4.6 from sixteen thousand are not the same claim, so the number of ratings goes in the same sentence as the average, on every page and every card. The reviews sets out how thin the evidence actually is, including the seven listings with no written review under them at all.

Where the answer is “nobody publishes that”, the page says so. The palace administration does not publish visitor numbers for Hohenschwangau, because Hohenschwangau is not its building: under the 1923 settlement Linderhof went to the Free State of Bavaria and Hohenschwangau went to the Wittelsbach family foundation, which is also why its tickets are sold by a different office. So that cell on the comparison page stays empty rather than getting filled with a guess. No source consulted here gives a road distance or a drive time from Munich, so this site does not print one. The administration’s own biography of Ludwig II gives no height, so his page says that instead of repeating the figure that circulates online with a precision nobody can support. And his death is an open dispute, so that page gives the official ruling, gives the physical findings, names the dispute and stops.

How it pays for itself

Booking links go to GetYourGuide, which pays a commission on bookings made through them. You pay the same either way. It buys none of the above, and the cheapest check on that claim is that the page you are most likely to land on tells you the palace sells its own ticket at its own window for about eleven euros and tells you which bus goes there. A site optimising for commission would not lead with that. The affiliate disclosure is the long version.

Corrections are welcome and get acted on. Contact is the way in, and if you have found a figure here that is wrong I would rather know than not.