It sounds like all of you are experienced Europian travelers. Can you please give me an advice on how you plan your trips to Europe where you visit a few cities/places with the logistics: where do you stay at each city, do you make reservations in advance? Where do you rent a car? Why don't you move from city to city by train? And if you do how and where better to buy tickets? Do you do any reservations from the States at all? What is the best time of the year to go there? I've been thinking about this kind of vacation for some time, but not sure how to organize it. PLEASE HELP!!!

We were all beginners, once!

I think Rick Steves book, "Europe through the back door", is a good place for a novice to start. He explains the pros and cons of various modes of transportation, and has lots of useful hints on every aspect of traveling in Europe. It will get you started.

The earliest stages of planning your first trip to Europe can be overwhelming. Based on your questions, my advice would include the following

1) Begin by choosing the city (or cities) where you will arrive and depart. This will be the most important single constraint on your trip. If you decide to fly into London and fly out of Paris (as my wife and I did on our first trip to Europe), this will make destinations like Rome and Prague impractical. With London and Paris as endpoints, you would naturally focus on inbetween places like Belgium and The Netherlands. Once you have decided on the "airports," other choices begin to fall into place.

2) Try to spend at least two nights in each location. Otherwise, you are so preoccupied with logistics (transportation, finding your hotel, etc.) that you will not adequately appreciate each destination.

3) If you are going to spend all of your time in large cities, you will not need a car and can get around solely by train. If you are going to visit more rural areas, such as Bavaria's Romantic Road or Alsace's Wine Road, a car is mandatory. With the exception of Eurostar (Chunnel) tickets and rail passes, you should have no problem buying your train tickets once you are in Europe.

4) If you will have a limited amount of time, you should book your hotels in advance. Flexibility comes at a cost - namely, time. If you try to "wing it" and choose your hotels as you travel, you may have to sacrifice a significant portion of your sight-seeing time to find a place, especially during peak tourist times.

5) Most of us have found that the best car rental "deal" varies from year to year. Watch this forum for comments, and familiarize yourself with the more popular agencies (Europecar, Auto Europe, Budget, Six, etc.).

6) Choosing an appropriate hotel in a city that you have never visited is always a challenge. When I am driving, I usually try to get a hotel that is near a major train station or a significant tourist landmark. There are usually signs leading you to these type of locations, and you won't spend hours looking for your hotel (don't assume that internet maps will solve this problem - they are often inaccurate). When I am near the station or landmark, I park the car and find the hotel on foot - usually within ten minutes.

Good luck.

I think the next thing you need to keep in mind that on this board, and to a certain extent in print guides, there is a certain degree of subjectivity and opinion. The perfect example is the statement in the post previous to mine about a car being "mandatory" when you visit the Romantic Road.
I disagree with it and a lot of others would disagree with it and a lot of other "mandatory" statements made on this board.
Nothing is necessarily "mandatory" nor are there necessarily any "rules" that you "have" to follow.
My advice: do your own research, ask questions here, and always bear in mind that what is great for some may end up being worthless for you.

Planning a trip is almost as much fun as the actual travel for me. I love to find a bargain that pans out beautifully and I might add that I have rarely been disappointed with my extensively researched choices.

I must agree with smueller who said select your arrive and depart cities first. This past year we arrived in Rome and flew out of Paris. Depending on where you go will determine, in part, what means of transportation will best suit your needs. I also agree with smueller that a car in a large city can tend to be a liability. We drove a car from Frankfurt to Lucerne and then onto Paris. In Paris I parked the car for $8 a day and did not get back into it until we left for the airport. Paris is very difficult city in which to drive. The street signs are so obscure as they are posted far away on buildings. I found this practice to be aesthetically appealing ,but it made for tough navigating. The metro there is fantastic,so that and taxis is what we use. Driving on German and French highways is an extremely exhilarating thrill that I advise doing. Airfare is becoming increasingly reasonable in Europe since deregulation of that industry and the creation of the European union.

I like the Bastille area of Paris and I rather liked the Republic area which I just saw this past trip. Both of these areas are less touristy and more reasonably priced. Bastille area is full of good little cafes, bars, bakeries, grocery stores,and the transportation is great. We stayed in the Spanish steps area of Rome this year,but I would probably choose the Pantheon or campo di fiore area next time. Lucerne Switzerland is beautiful and we stayed outside of town about 15 miles in a quaint and tremendously inexpensive hotel located high in the hills. Switzerland can be very pricey ,so I was especially proud of our hotel with a great free breakfast for only $40 or so a night. What a deal.

I rented a car with Europcar in Frankfurt and the experience was OK. I had ask for a Volkswagen golf wagon and was instead given a Fiat stilo and a $100 rebate. I loved that little car.

In answer to your questions regarding reservations. I make all of my lodging , plane , and car rental reservations from the states. Tickets for museums, trains, etc. can more easily and usually more cheaply be made while in Europe.

Just a few suggestions that I hope answered a question or two. Have fun. Tim

If you have any more questions regarding budget travel email me at [email protected].

Agali,
If this is your first trip I'd say do not over-extend yourself. By that I mean choose a couple of places and not 15 cities in 14 days. If you have never been to Europe before the easiest (I think) starting off point is London, and there is so much to see there you can spend all your time there. Combining another city (or two, depending on the time you will spend abroad) is reasonable, but I would not try and see all of Europe in two weeks or some such thing.

I make all our reservations from the states, hotels, theater, trains, etc. Practically everything and everyplace has a website now so that's easy. You can make it even easier on yourself by booking with a company like Best Western International (web or 800 number). They have lots of hotels in Europe that belong to their marketing program (they are all individually owned hotels).

Just ask plenty of questions on this forum, everyone here is pretty helpful.

We are a family of three, our daughter is 8 years old, and that would be her first trip to Europe. We are thinking to spend 10-14 days there in late Jly -August timeframe.

If we stay in London, what would be the other places to see? Are there any other suggestions on Itinerary (countries/places)?

If you do all your reservations from here how do you know and choose hotels to stay, and trust those would be safe and fairly nice?

Please share with me sites/hotels/ names/phone numbers and any other info you can.

APPRECIATE ALL YOUR HELP IN ADVANCE!

Agali

I would suggest heading to the library or bookstore and picking up a few guidebooks. London is a great place to start European travel and there are plenty of day trips out of the city that you could spend your whole vacation there. For a bit more variety, I would take the Eurostar to Paris and spend half your time there. Guidebooks have good hotel recommendations. Once you have an idea where you might want to stay do a search on this board to see what comments people have made. I wouldn't rent a car for England or Paris unless you want to travel into the counryside.

Agali- all of the above offer good advice so you could follow most and have good results. This is what I did to arrange a multi-city van/train trip for my wife and myself and 2 other couples: I did ALL of the hotel arrangements via email. Arranged for a van rental at Frankfurt via Alamo before we left. We purchased our Railpasses for the rail part of our trip before we left. All bought their own airline tickets since they were arriving in Frankfurt from different parts of USA. Result? Use van for travel to Rothenburg, Nuremburg, Garmisch. Dropped it off in Muncich and took train to Berlin and then night train to Paris and local to Bayeux and back from there, via Paris (for one last meal!) to Frankfurt. No problems with anything. All hotels were arranged via email. Before we left, I confirmed van rental and all hotels one more time. Great time and no problems. You can do it!

It can be a very tough job to plan well.
I have done it more than 7 dozen times and the planning is part of the experience--a big part. Go to www.slowtrav.com and find their section for planning and see my articles about planning, budget, and travel tips. That will help you to get started. There is also a classic post from years ago on this forum called " How do you plan your trip to Europe"--that is close. Go to the search baove and enter that--you will find it. Good luck--it takes time.

I think London is the perfect city for your first trip to Europe. At least you don't have to worry so much about the language factor. Your daughter will love it-my boys first trip there was when they were 5 and 9 and we had a great time. There is so much to see in London that you can spend most of your time there then take daytrips by train (perhaps to Oxford and/or Bath, also Windsor castle). Definitely need to do the London Eye (get reservations in advance when you arrive) and the Tower of London (pretty much a whole day can be spent there). Also the British Museum is very good with kids. I would do at least one play. Lion King is a good choice. My boys loved Starlight Express. In London, you can go almost everywhere by subway, but we get a cab (they are very different than US cabs and very cool) at night or if we're just really tired. Get on the internet and start researching. No need for a car on this trip--believe me, you don't want to drive in London. And no need to buy tickets for train day-trips in advance. Reserve hotel through their website or a big site such as Travelocity and try to get one with breakfast included that is close to a metro stop. Also make sure you get one that allows 3 persons in a room. London is somewhat expensive so usually we eat a big English breakfast at the hotel, snack at lunchtime, then have dinner. Take your daughter to tea at one of the hotels instead of eating dinner one evening--my boys loved that.

We generally make lodging reservations in advance. If we are going to rent a car, we also make car reservations in advance. On the trips we've made, rail passes were always more expensive than point-to-point tickets, so we have never bought train tickets before leaving home. For much of Europe, I'd say May/June and Sept/Oct would be pretty good months to travel. I'd read up on various European destinations and see what sounds interesting to you--then plan your trip around that. If you have 2 weeks or less, don't visit more than one larger and one smaller country (and for places like Italy and Germany, definitely spend the entire time in just the one country). Once you've decided the length of time you have available and the major areas/country(s) you want to visit, then start plotting out routes, number of days in each city/town, etc.

London does have alot of things to do. I took my 3 kids there around your daughters age for a week and they loved it. We also went to alot of plays...you can get discount tickets. They really enjoyed that. One day we did a bus tour to stonehedge and bath. Another day we took a boat down to Greenwich. We also took a train to Hampton court. They liked the Tower of London (we got the audio headsets)and they learned alot too. You could also easily go to Paris and spend a few days there. It is a beautiful city. You could take a train there. In Paris we stayed at the Hotel St. Paul which was a little, but very nice hotel(3 star with breakfast included) in the 6th close the the Luxembourg gardens. It was a nice area to stay in. We could walk to alot of things...take the train to the airport and the metro was close. For your first time this would be a fairly easy trip to do...especially if you could fly into one city and out the the other.

Actually what you should do is go the the bookstore or library and just start looking through travel books to see where you would most want to go. Then decide whether you want to drive or take a train. Last summer, for example, I found good plane fares on Iberia airline...so we flew into Barcelona which was great. We stayed there several days and then took the train into France. I had prebooked the train tickets from here. We went into France...to Perpignan and rented a car from Hertz. It was very easy to get the car...about 1/2 block away from the station. The roads were great to drive in france. From there we went to Carcassone and then Avignon, Nice, and into Italy. We flew home from Venice. I wouldn't go that far with 10-14 days, but if you look for good airfares to a few cities you would like to go to ... and then plan from there. I tried not to drive more than 3 hours any day which was good. Good luck