Rail travel usually loses the lounge game to flying, but Deutsche Bahn is quietly bucking the trend. The freshly renovated DB Premium Lounge at Cologne Central Station has reopened, and it's a genuinely pleasant place to kill an hour before an ICE departure — a claim few European train lounges can make.
Deutsche Bahn runs 13 lounges nationwide, and seven of the bigger stations (Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne, Mannheim and Munich) include a Premium tier on top of the regular lounge. Standard lounges pour water, soft drinks and coffee; the Premium side adds food, beer and wine. The menu changes quarterly and is largely the same across the country — Munich gets a different beer, apparently a matter of regional honour.
Getting in is easier than most people think. The sweet spots: a first class Rail&Fly ticket booked with one of 50-plus airlines (roughly €60 each way), Lufthansa Express Rail business class or Miles & More Senator/HON Circle status, a same-day first class fully flexible long-distance ticket, or BahnBonus Platinum membership. Notably, Star Alliance Gold alone doesn't cut it despite DB becoming an intermodal Star Alliance partner in 2022. Access lasts the whole day at any location nationwide, and kids under 14 ride and enter free with an adult.
The Cologne lounge itself sits inside the station by track 1, with the Premium section on the right and the regular lounge on the left. Expect a dining area, sofas and armchairs, a quieter zone with high-backed chairs, German newspapers, and — a true luxury at a German station — clean restrooms. The reviewer's breakfast of warm croissants, yogurt with protein crispies, a wheat beer and summer-only Magnum ice cream bars gives you the idea: this is light, centrally produced food rather than a cooked kitchen, but perfectly decent.
The context matters too. Cologne station couldn't be better placed — the cathedral is across the street and the Rhine a short stroll away. Express Rail passengers can also relax knowing that if a delayed train makes them miss their Lufthansa flight, free rebooking is guaranteed since train and flight are one through-ticket. The catch: German rail is mid-way through a huge, decades-long investment programme, so delays and construction disruption are the norm for now.
For anyone flying into Frankfurt and connecting onward by rail, or booking a Rail&Fly ticket for a German holiday, the Premium Lounge turns waiting time from platform purgatory into something civilised. Compared with Eurostar's cocktail-heavy lounges, ÖBB's modest Austrian offering or SNCF's thin Grand Voyageur salons, DB arguably runs the best railway lounges in Europe — high praise, low bar, but still praise.
