How to get reservations for Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany
You can visit the Oktoberfest beer tents without a reservation. If you do this, plan to arrive as early as possible, especially with a large group. During the week, arrive no later than 2:30 p.m.; on weekends, go in the morning. Otherwise, you run the risk tents will be full, and if you don’t have a seat, you won’t be served any beer. If you do decide to reserve, this must be done directly with individual tents.
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| Oktoberfest gate in Munich, Germany |
Probably the best thing for out-of-towners to do is to purchase an Oktoberfest package. Viator offers one that includes a tour of the grounds, a ride on the creaky Ferris wheel (on a clear day you can see the Alps), and a reserved seat in a tent with beer and food. Seating on my tour in 2010 was reserved from noon until around 5 p.m. and included two litres of beer and half of a roasted chicken per person (drink and food is a mandatory purchase with tickets to the tents). Iain, our English guide, whose Mick Jagger-blue eyes almost exactly matched his blue-and-white shirt, said he had been attending Oktoberfest for 10 years and informed us that “we’ve got serious beer drinking to do.” We were cautioned to be sensible and not to become bierleichen, or "beer corpses”—a term that refers to passed out drinkers, NOT dead drinkers. As our group got ready to board the Ferris wheel, he told us that the weather that day was “fur”--or was it “farn”?—when a warm wind comes over the Alps and everyone gets headaches and aggressive and drunk. He said that on this kind of day you “can see for crazy miles.”
We learned that 70% of people attending are from Bavaria (50% from Munich, 20% from the rest of Germany, and 10% from the rest of the world--with Italians and Australians making up the largest portion). In 2010, 6.2 million-plus people attended. Iain refers to this--the biggest festival on Earth—as “the beast.” While we caught our breath, he filled us in on the history. Oktoberfest started long ago, when people figured out that the best way to get rid of an excess of beer was to have a festival. Tents began appearing in 1881. Albert Einstein installed light bulbs in the 1800s in the Schot tent. “Now people pour in through the gates like beer into a stein. It’s mad, absolutely mad. Good times,” he declared, and then pointed out that Germany was created as a country only in 1871, that it is a baby compared to the U.S.—the same age as Lucky Strike cigarettes! Before we enter our tent, he tells us that amazingly everything is removed from the fairgrounds after the last day. The area becomes an empty field with roads. One of my tour mates summed it all up as “like a state fair on steroids.”
More Oktoberfest in Munich.
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