Traveling Europe 101: Destinations and Searching Air Fares

1. Figure out where to fly in to and where to fly out from
2. Take travel time into account
3. It is all relative

If you have a general idea where you’d like to go and you have your holiday dates figured out, take the biggest step and book your multi city ticket. Clamp down on a specific destination by booking your ticket and let the places in between develop on its own. Once the plane ticket is purchased, everything will fall into place.

Deciding that I wanted to participate La Tomatina as the highlight for my third trip, I randomly decided where I wanted to fly into and where I wanted to fly out from. This decision was based on wanting to start my holiday on a nice slow pace and end it in a party city. In doing so, I choose Lisbon as my in route and Prague as my out route: two countries that are completely distant from each other. As I started to go through my reference books, everything in between began to develop including La Tomatina. As I decided each city I wanted to visit, travel time and the amount of days I wanted to spend in each city were accounted for. The in between cities that I choose were Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Salzburg. I chose Florence because I wanted to taste the Tuscan region, Bologna because just because, Venice because I wanted to go back and get another painting from the same artist whom I purchased from during my first trip, and Salzburg because I wanted to do the cheesy Sound of Music Tour.

When planning destinations, travel time must be accounted for. In addition the amount of time you’re willing to spend on the road traveling should also be thought out. Distance between cities is all relative. Europe is a large country. The technique I use is thinking in terms of how long it takes me to travel from San Francisco to LA; or how long it takes to fly to New York from San Francisco.

There are several web sites that I use to search for my multi-city Airline ticket.
- Travelzoo.com
- Cheapoair.com
- Cheapair.com
- Cheaptickets.com

When purchasing tickets, I’ve discovered bookings during midweek are cheaper than bookings during the weekend. In addition, flying in and out of the country is cheaper midweek rather than the weekend.