To see our first part of the trip, click here.
Since we weren’t able to get on the cruise ship like we planned, we decided to spend the next 5 nights in Hamburg. Fortunately, our hotel had availability for us and we didn’t even have to move the room.
Pierdrei Hotel Hafencity Hamburg
I had a little love and hate relationship with this hotel. The hotel is beautiful, and very kids friendly. The room we booked is an extra large family room, which came with a little bunk bed bedroom. The bathroom is spacious, although the toilet area was entirely separate from the shower and was quite tight. The on site restaurant serves good breakfast and kids are free with paying adults. There is a kid’s camp that’s free to spend less than an hour at a time, and a reasonable cost if staying longer. And the best part of all is the location. It’s in the middle of Hafencity, close to several Michelin star restaurants and walkable to many local attractions. Buses and trains are also nearby. However, the biggest let down of this hotel was the toilet that kept breaking. Don’t get me wrong, I know things break from time to time, but how they handled it was really the let-down part. It stopped working one day in the middle of the night, so we told them about it as we were going out in the morning. They said they would fix it right away. We came home at the end of the day to find out it wasn’t fixed. No one had even been in our room to look at it. When I talked to the front desk again, they told us they couldn’t have anyone to fix it because it was a Sunday. So we were forced to change rooms. They told me they would remove a breakfast and the Miniature Wonderland ticket costs from our folio. When I went back upstairs to let my family know about changing rooms, surprisingly, I walked into the housekeeping working on the toilet. He was able to fix the toilet so we decided to stay in our room. Well a few days later, it broke again. This time we called straight to housekeeping and he came to fix it again. At checkout, the front desk had apparently reversed our discount of all the trouble we had with the toilet and told me since we didn’t change rooms, we weren’t qualified for a discount any more. On top of that, they charged us for umbrellas that we had already returned. I had to let them know that the toilet had broken down again and I didn’t even want to complain. After some back and forth, they did remove one breakfast and the umbrellas, but it really left a very bad taste in my mouth. We paid a lot of money to stay 6 nights in this hotel. I feel we should have been treated better. Additionally, I don’t feel the front desk people were very good at their job. I asked about how to make a local phone call from the room, I was told to dial 10, then the phone number. That didn’t work at all. So I ended up having to use my own cell phone and pay for international long distance for all the phone calls I had to make to AIDA.
Travel Tips:
Since our hotel was so centrally located, we could have saved money by not purchasing all inclusive bus tickets (the Hamburg Card). Most of the attractions we went to required less than 20 minutes of walking, and when we did ride the train or bus, it was only one stop or a few stops that single ticket purchases would have been cheaper. The discounts that come with the Hamburg Card for local attractions didn’t help us most of the time because it’s usually cheaper to just buy family tickets. However, it was good that we didn’t have to figure out how to buy bus tickets each time, so the Hamburg Card was useful for us in that sense.
Christmas Markets
There were lots of Christmas Markets around town when we were in Hamburg. The first one we encountered was next to the main train station when we tried to get a second COVID test for Alice. We were there mid-afternoon on Friday and it wasn’t crowded at all. There were lots of shops and everything looked so yummy. We didn’t buy anything because Ava and Teddy weren’t with us and we didn’t want them to feel left out. This Christmas market is called Christmas market on Spitalerstrasse.
Next to our hotel was another Christmas market called Christmas market in the HafenCity. This Christmas market was pretty small and not open for as many hours as most others. The Christmas tree is beautiful though and there were many vendors inside tents so it was good for a rainy day, which was pretty frequent in the area.
One night, after having dinner at the All-You-Can-Order restaurant, Kofookoo Yam’cha, we stumbled onto another Christmas Market called Christmas market on Gerhart-Hauptmann-Platz. This one felt the most homey – the vendors were nice and the prices were the best. When I told them we wanted to pay for the mugs to keep as souvenir, they seemed so happy.
As a Christmas Market newbie, we made the mistake of going to the most popular Christmas market on a Saturday night. Definitely not something I would recommend to my worst enemy. It was the Historic Christmas market on Rathausmarkt. It was SO crowded that the family separated and got lost of one another before we even entered the market. There were so many people that it was nearly impossible to walk anywhere and forget about buying anything.
So we decided to walk towards the water and hit the Christmas market on Jungfernstieg, which is located on the water. It was still crowded but not nearly as bad. We were able to enjoy some mulled wine, bratwursts and crepes.
This concludes all of our Christmas Market journey. We had lots of great mulled wine, spiced hot chocolate, and saw so many Christmas lights. There are so many Christmas markets it seems every corner you turn. I will never attend a big one on a Saturday night again though. One thing to keep in mind, Christmas market is a tradition so you will encounter many vendors that are cash only, and some that don’t speak much English at all. I love the festive nature of these markets and it’s definitely something we enjoyed as a family.