If you’d like to experience the Rennsteig at your own pace, this trip offers an especially relaxed take on long-distance walking. The Rennsteig Leisure Tour is designed for walkers who prefer shorter daily stages of around 12 to 15 kilometres and want to savour Germany’s best-known ridge trail rather than tick it off as a sporting challenge. Instead of long, demanding stretches, you can look forward to well-planned walking days, plenty of time for viewpoints, woodland sections and breaks – and that’s exactly what makes this journey through the Thuringian Forest so appealing.

The route is divided into three sections and can be booked flexibly as a single stage or as the full Rennsteig walk. Tour A leads in five walking days from Hörschel to Oberhof, Tour B from Oberhof to Neuhaus am Rennweg, and Tour C from Neuhaus am Rennweg to Blankenstein. If you combine all sections, you experience the Rennsteig in full with 14 walking days, and you can make the holiday even more enjoyable with extra rest days. The result is a walking holiday in Germany that can be tailored to your fitness and your own rhythm.

En route you walk self-guided yet with excellent organisation. You stay in hotels and country hotels, without having to change hotels every day, which makes the trip especially comfortable. Included are breakfast, tourist tax, the necessary transfers to and from the Rennsteig, luggage transfer when changing hotels, a route description with suggested refreshment stops, the Rennsteig walking map and the traditional Rennsteig pin badge. The official Rennsteig website describes walking without luggage as a particularly convenient way to experience the trail along its entire length – and you’ll feel that benefit on this trip day after day.

Scenically, the Rennsteig Leisure Tour offers everything that makes the trail so popular: quiet forests, panoramic ridges, stage towns rich in tradition such as Oberhof, Frauenwald, Neuhaus am Rennweg or Blankenstein, and the lovely feeling of moving step by step along one of Germany’s great long-distance trails. If you want to walk the Rennsteig without luggage and value shorter stages, smooth organisation and a true immersion in nature, this holiday is a particularly well-matched choice.