Bewildered by the myriad possibilities? Does starting your International travel planning seem a bit daunting? Infinite options don't make things easier...
Want something special? A trip that's uniquely yours?
Here's our how-to guide to help get you engaged with the process and have more fun planning your EuroVacation!
Starting Ideas
Float some ideas
See what gets you excited. From past trip planning and answering questions on hundreds of itineraries, I've noticed that you'll often find one or two "centerpiece" destinations around which to focus an effective and creative itinerary.
If traveling alone…
Get yourself psyched up! Read a humorous travel book, look for articles on Europe, visit Europe websites, check currency exchange rates, talk it up with friends (usually getting a healthy dose of great advice in the bargain), or try leaving a travel guidebook on the table to thumb through.
If traveling with others…
Same thing, but get them psyched for travel adventure! This usually leads to the next step of gathering trip destination ideas. Communication is key to building excitement and ensuring you all get kicks on your personal Route 66. Be willing to trade off a city or two - Europe is intense everywhere, so no worries!
Write down destination ideas
Simple, just gather them together somewhere, perhaps a folder with articles, notes on cocktail napkins, whatever. In a few weeks or less, you'll have a year's worth of incredible plans to sort into a two-week trip!
Hmmm, okay, how to pare down 1001 ideas into a manageable and fantastic short vacation?
This differs significantly by your trip length and style. And don't feel pressured to settle too quickly on an itinerary - let it percolate slowly, and negotiate with your traveling companions. First, figure out what type of trip you are planning for. Some common trips include:
· 1 or 2-week power vacation
· Relaxing 2-weeker (maybe visiting a relative or one region)
· 1 Month in Europe
· Summer in Europe
· Heck with it, I'm moving to Europe!
10 Planning Tips
Let's assume a 7 day to 17 day vacation timeframe, one where you feel like you've "done" Europe (at least a bit). I won't bother with standard "Paris-London-Rome" itineraries, you can figure that out.
Want something different? Go through the steps above and follow some tips below on organizing your thoughts and your journey. Oftentimes, one person can act as point for itinerary coordination to keep travel times and numbers on schedule and within reason.
1. Save Travel Time.
Ditch any location that takes 2 days or more to visit roundtrip. Save such destination ideas for your next trip. For example, adding London and Rome to the same short trip would be a time-killer. Keep in mind that unless your plane ticket is "open-jaw" you'll be arriving/departing from the same city and this usually means planning a circle journey.
2. Identify days on the ground in Europe.
Is it 15? 8? 11? Don't include air travel days. Write down a blank for each day on a piece of paper or spreadsheet.
3. Add Key Destinations.
This gives your trip pillars to work around. Then, fill in blanks with other destinations to gauge travel time. 3 days in Rome? 2 days in Munich? 1 travel day between them (or zero travel time if you do an overnight train)?
4. First day in Europe.
Assume it's only 1/2 day for sightseeing as you'll be tired and should sleep early and long to adjust to Eurotime! Stay away until 8 or 9pm (no naps if you can help it!), then sleep for 12 hours... Ahhh! You're now on European Standard Time!
5. Consider Intra-Europe Travel Timesavers.
Open-jaw plane tickets allow you to fly into one city (say, Berlin) and end up in another city for departure to the US (Paris, for example). This saves time because you don't have to backtrack on your trip. Adding an overnight train between far-apart cities (maybe 1 per every 2 weeks of travel is more than plenty) can save an entire day of your vacation, along with being equivalently priced to a hotel room, so there's no extra cost.
6. Hub & Spoke.
Have 2 key destinations? Look for daytrips from each, and look for destinations to hit in between. This saves hotel changes and re-packing and otherwise getting re-situated. From Florence, for example, you can take long day trips to Venezia (Venice), Rome, Pisa and the like. From London, travel to Bath or Stratford-upon-Avon on day trips.
7. BIG & small.
Good travelers add a healthy helping of small-town spice to create beautiful, memorable, enjoyable trips. If I had to condense this entire article to one point, this would be it: no matter your trip length, mix it up! Rally through Rome, but consider a side of San Gimignano. Like Lucerne in Switzerland? How about Mürren in the Mountains? You'll appreciate the differences and enjoy the change of pace. Just a day or two away from big cities can add new dimensions to your trip, and give you that special, impossible-to-plan experience of a lifetime. It has for me, every time.
8. Country focus.
How many is too much? A tough question, base this on your preference for hectic travel (and the preference of your travel mates). Focus on one country to preserve sanity, allowing more absorption of the local culture and convenience of pre-trip education. On the other hand, 4 countries in 17 days can be done - and with regimented planning this can be invigorating, fresh, eye-opening and intense (and tiring). Remember, more countries means re-familiarizing yourself with a new culture every couple days. At least the money is basically the same now.
9. Travel Method.
Train or car? Either can be effective, but invoke very different trip styles and itineraries. Traveling alone, I highly recommend trains. When together I've enjoyed both modes. Both provide for great day trip options. Consider trains for part of the trip, and a car rental for areas which aren't well-served by public transport.
Cars let you explore the back alleys of a region, off the main traveler routes (say, Austria's Salzkammergut lake region or France's Dordogne Valley). Italy and further south is not recommended for car travel for driving safety/theft reasons.
Trains let you relax en route and focus on your destination cities. Amazingly efficient and on-time, (don't show up late) you get extended travel options for daytrips and between hub destinations, as well as downtime for planning your arrival, postcard writing, journals, cards, GameBoy playing, snacking, etc.
10. International Arrivals & Departures.
Ensure your arrival city is one of your key destinations to save on intra-Europe travel time. If you have a choice, consider arrival days of the week. Departing the US Thursday is usually cheaper than Friday and returning on a weekend day less hectic. Try using two weekends for minimum leave from work, and try hedging with a Monday holiday or, cough-cough, "sick" day.
Putting some of these tips into action, here's a trip built (and then taken) with great results, a classic two-week power vacation.
Sample Trip Itinerary
This spreadsheet was put together during Spring as we developed our plan. It's very simple, yet it helped us rough out where to visit, and visually see what was and was not possible (i.e. we quickly discovered that London or Rome were too far off from our key destinations for this trip).
• PDF format File: September Travel Itinerary
• Web Page: September Travel Itinerary
Planning Discussion in Detail
September 9-25: 3 people, 15 days on the ground in France, Germany, Switzerland, & Austria.
We considered overall budgets and time allotted. Wanting a good 2 weeks, we extended it to 17 total days by including 5 weekend days. 12 days total vacation time, less sick time and holidays. We departed the US on Thursday for airfare cost savings. We had one person coming from Denver, one from New York, and the 3rd from Phoenix.
The constraint on planning was that we wanted to be in our key destination of Munich, Germany for Oktoberfest towards the last week of September. We pushed the rest of the trip earlier to end at Oktoberfest, for reasons of weather and the likelihood of being tired from celebrating in Munich and wanting to go home then.
With that one simple choice to focus on Munich, we were off to the races! The itinerary started to take shape. We plugged that into our spreadsheet.
17 days total, 15 ground days, at least 3 days in Munich to finish the trip, so 12 days left to plan. Each of us added destination options, ranging from Paris and London in the west, Berlin and Oslo in the north, Austria in the east, and Italy and Greece in the south.
Clearly, some pruning would have to happen.
Drawing a reasonable travel circle around Munich put Greece, Norway, and England off for a later trip. Besides, London is best done as an England/Wales/Scotland/Ireland trip unless you have big $$$ to pay for the Chunnel train from either Paris or Brussels to London.
"Well, Paris is nice, right?" comments one of our travel crew. A classic EuroDestination, we try adding Paris to the mix. This comment innocently begins hours of playing with itineraries and lots of emails among us three, deciding we could perhaps start in Paris, especially since airfare was looking cheaper to Paris for our departure times.
We further narrowed Italy out of the bunch for this sojourn. To stay further north & central with Paris and Munich, Italy would quickly absorb available travel and sleep time. Besides, we didn't necessarily want to take overnight trains in Italy, it's not as safe as elsewhere in Europe.
Now, with Paris and Munich bookends to start and end the trip, we took a look at the middle. Either take the high road via Belgium and Amsterdam, or go centrally across Switzerland and Austria. To get a nice feel of mountains, clean air, snow, and the breathtaking Alps in between our big city adventures, we choose the central route.
The trip really starts to take shape now. We want to sprinkle small cities with large. From big-city Paris we'll travel southeast to the Swiss Alps (Interlaken, Mürren, Gimmelwald) for small-town mountain appreciation. From here we continue east to find big-city Vienna, Austria for more of that "culture" stuff. We switch back and forth from here, hitting tiny Hallstadt, mid-size Salzburg, classically quaint Rothenburg, and power-finishing in big-city Munich as our final hub.
Unfortunately, we chose to both arrive and depart from Paris. We should have gone open-jaw so as to arrive in Paris and depart from Munich. We cheaped out and had to pay for an overnight train back to Paris immediately before the plane ride home, so savings ended up being minimal and over 24 hours of travel to get home was reallllly lonnnnnnnnnnnnng.
Our Results?
We did daytrips and overnight trips from our Munich hub, including the famous Neuschwanstein Castle, the infamous Dachau concentration camp, and Rothenburg.
For maximum flexibility, we chose EuroPass train passes for the 1st half and a car for travel in Germany and Austria to finish.
2 overnight train trips were a bit much, but allowed us to hit 4 countries, about 8 cities and a lot of fun in 15 ground days. Note: get sleeper reservations in train compartments with 4 or fewer people, the cost is worth it if you can afford it! Otherwise, the 6-sleeper or general seating is a great way to lose a bit of sleep and save a lot of money (no lodging cost for the evening in the general 1st/2nd class seating if you can sleep sitting up in bright light).
Total travel time for the trip is 85 hours, including airtime and on-the-ground travel, 50 hours throughout Europe, 35 or so for International travel. Not bad. A Munich-based return flight would have saved 10 hours and a bit of sanity.
We had great times in each locale, taking breathers between big cities, splitting up during the day in Vienna to explore on our own, mixing thousands of years of culture with millions of years of breathtaking geography. We never felt overly pressured, but a bit rushed to hit trains a couple of times (e.g. the 7am train Sunday morning from Paris to Interlaken was a bit early, and I apologize yet again to my travel companions).
We each took 8-10 rolls of film (2 35mm cameras, 1 new 31mm APS camera). Pictures often overlapped, as in the case of Neuschwanstein, where we single-handedly improved Kodak's employee bonus for the year. On all subsequent trips, I have switched to a 3.1 Megapixel digital camera, with no regrets and lots more to show for it. Read the Photography section for details.
Without skimping (i.e. no hostels, no overnight trips without beds, a couple of souvenirs, tasty restaurants, liquor), total costs for the trip averaged $2,500 per person, including film and photo development back home, airfare, train travel, car travel, food, lodging, and sight-seeing. As mentioned, 12 days off for vacation/sick time were needed.
Enjoying Europe for the first time? Priceless.
