For Our Itinerary...
Hey there! Thanks so much for checking this out. My cousin and I are going on a Euro Trip this summer from May 27 to June 25. We're super psyched but just want to figure out the cheapest ways of doing things and traveling around. We already have our airfare booked to get to Copenhagen (where we'll be basing out of kind of because we have friends and relatives in the south of Sweden).With your help we firmed up our plans for where we roughly want to go and have a good idea for what will be happening now, but we just need to figure out and solve the final question of the cheapest and most economical travel options. Here is a pretty solid itinerary of where we plan to be going now:
Copenhagen > Hamburg > Berlin > Prague > Krakow > Prague > Munich > Vienna > Budapest > Thessalonica > Istanbul/turkey > Copenhagen
We have some friends/family in a few places that we will stay with. Otherwise we hope to try out Couch Surfing a few nights for fun, but otherwise we'll stay at Hostels.
We already have a flight booked from Budapest to Thessalonica through Ryan Air. We are going to book our flight from Istanbul to Copenhagen soon through Air Baltic.
Otherwise for the Denmark/Germany/Czech/Poland/Austria/Hungary side of things we are trying to figure out the most economical means of travel.
We originally planned Eurail / Interrail (he's not European, I am), but we are debating if it is the best value now. We'd get something like x days with in y time frame probably. But is it reasonable if we book ahead that we could get better deals with Eurolines / individual country buses/trains? When we get to Greece / Turkey, I've noticed you just have to buy tickets on site and can't really pre-book... is that the case?
Thank you so much for your help, advice, and expertise to make this an awesome trip! :)
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No, not at all gawkabout... lol... Did you miss my questions? I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. We've decided what we'd like to see (roughly) and have worked out an itinerary, we just want advice on -- for our plans -- what the best mode of transportation would be price wise. That's why I posted in this section of TT.Just advice from someone who has traveled in Europe before. Prices of buses/trains seem to vary so much and it seems difficult to pre-book too much, and we don't want to be stuck having to pay at bus stations or train stations exorbitant amounts if we can either pre-book for cheaper or just go ahead with Eurail / Interrail.
Thanks again
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The only way you can work out the cheapest is to add up all the individual prices and compare them with the Eurail price......At a quick glance I'd say its not worth doing Eurail for you...I'd do a combination of trains and buses,depending on what is cheaper from one destination to the next......you have a lot of stops but the distance between them is not great.
Personally i wouldn't book ahead at all......
Much more flexible to just jump on a train or bus when you want to move on...rather than pre book in advance.You may find that you want to spend more time in some of these places and miss some out completely....11 stops in a month is too many for me.....
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It sounded ok until I read the jump to Greece and Turkey part.The two commonest mistakes that travellers make is trying to cover too much in too little time and packing too much. You've made the first,care to tell us what you plan to pack?
30 days is a reasonable amount of time in which to visit a MAXIMUM of 7 places. That would work using the 'Rule of 3s' which says never stop anywhere for less than 3 full days/4 nights unless it is just an overnight stop between A and B. Note the LESS THAN, it is a minimum.
Each time you move you more or less lose a day to physical travel time. That is why it is 3/4. Even following that rule you lose 25% of your time to moving rather than being IN a place seeing/doing things. Yes you see the scenery from the bus/train window but that's all you see/do for that day.
You want to save money but plan to move a lot. The received wisdom here on the TT is that each day actually on the road generally costs double what being IN a place costs. So the less you move the less it costs and that is where you could find more signifigant savings than whether to buy a pass or point to point tickets.
