Organized Tours

The tourist office conducts walking tours of Bern May to October. The daily meeting point is either at the tourist office at 11am or at Zytgloggeturm at 11am. The cost is 12F for adults, 6F for children 6 to 16, and free for children 5 and under. Depending on demand, this guided walking tour may or may not be offered by the time of your visit, since the focus of the tourist office's walking tours is to an increasing degree trained upon iPod-style audio guides that play a prerecorded 2-hour walking tour of Bern which can be started and stopped at any point, depending on the pace you want to maintain. Interspersed with descriptions of the Bernese monuments en route are anecdotes, folk songs, cheerful music, and far more than you might have initially thought of. These audio guides rent for 18F per day (14F per day for anyone who opts to buy a Bern Card), with a 50F deposit. For more information about how and where to acquire these audio guides, contact the Bern city tourist office.

Bern is accepted by many Swiss as the point of origin for several rail itineraries that are among the most spectacular in Europe. You'll probably need help from someone at the tourist office to organize one of these itineraries, but the staff at the Bern Tourist office is now capable of crafting and selling tickets for either one-way or circular itineraries which will take you through some of the most vertiginous landscapes in Europe. One of our favorites involves traveling from Bern through its Oberland region, with rail junctions in towns that include Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen, Wengen, and Kleine Scheidegg, then over the Jungfraujoch via Grindelwald and Interlaken, and back to Bern. Jungfraujoch, at 3,400m (11,152 ft.), has the highest railway station in Europe and offers panoramic views over glaciers and the Alps, including the so-called Ice Palace. The cost for this particular itinerary, which is self-conducted, self-guided, and self-scheduled, assuming that participants begin and end their journeys in Bern, is 148F in second class and 227F in first class. For anyone holding a valid Swiss Pass, prices of this itinerary are reduced to 52F for second-class travel, and 81F for first-class travel.