socorro

Has anyone gone to Lourdes, France and Rome, Italy on one trip? I'm helping my sister plan her trip with her family of 4 including 2 grade school kids. This will be there first time to go to Europe and since I just returned from Italy she asked for my help. Can someone provide some economical travel guides. I've been to Rome and can help her with that but never been to Lourdes. If they take the train from Lourdes to Rome is 12 days enough? Their budget is limited. Thank you!

Dukey

I've been to both but not in the same trip.

A rail journey from Lourdes to Rome will take at least 20 hours and require a minimum of three-four changes.

There are budget flights from Bordeaux (easily reached from Lourdes traveling through Pau and Dax) into Milan but only on certain days. I couldn;t find any budget flights into Italy out of either Montpellier or Toulouse.

If they could afford to fly from Toulouse that might be best but coud be expensive (you could look using www.opodo.com).

I wish I could offer more and hopefully others can be more helpful.

Steve_James

Hi Socorro - Alitalia and Air France fly Bordeaux-Rome.

You could also try the budget airline MyAir, who fly Bordeaux to Bologna.

When are they travelling? Flights with Myair start at € 55 for some dates ...

http://www.myair.com

Hope this helps ...

Steve

socorro

Thank you Dukey and Steve for your info. They will be travelling in July during the kids' summer breaks, w/c is a peak season. I will check the sites you recommended. Best regards to you both.

lovisa

It's unclear from your message whether they already have their main air fares to Europe. Are they flying open jaw into Paris and out of Rome or roundtrip from Paris? Do they need help buying those tickets? If this is really a pilgrimage trip, they might be able to go to Loreto and Assisi as well, although 12 days makes it tough.

socorro

Yes, it will be an open jaw from US to France (would the best arrival city be Paris?) then depart from Rome back to US. Nothing has been set yet, we are just planning the trip for her family. Thanks for helping me clarify this. I was recommending Assisi but a trip to Loreto would be great, too. Would 14 days be enough to include Loreto and Assisi? Assisi is my favorite place and I was recommending at least 1 - 2 nights there. How many days/nights would you recommend to visit Lourdes, Loretto, Assisi and Rome? I think a minimum of 5 days in Rome would be necessary.

lovisa

Lourdes is a time-consuming place to get from and to. Airfares for summer are so high, and given the combination she wants, she might be best served by using a tour company which specializes in pilgrimages such as
http://www.206tours.com/
http://catholicpilgrimagetours.com
If you search on Google you will find more agencies specializing in Catholic tours.

For flights, if you do it yourself, you might as well just fly into Paris open jaw and return from Rome. On Air France you can buy a ticket to Biarritz or Toulouse, but you have to change airports from CDG to Orly (ORY), which is a real pain. At best from Paris to Lourdes is a 5 3/4 hour rail journey. And there is no good way to get from Lourdes to Italy. As the poster above pointed out, one could fly from Bordeaux to Bologna or Marseilles to Rome, but neither of those is an enviable choice. If you're trying to be cheap you could fly roundtrip to Dublin via Aer Lingus, and then connect via Ryanair to Biarritz or Carcassone, but the connection times are poor. Then you would return to Dublin via Ryanair from Rome for the trip home.

For a novice traveller I would say go with a pilgrim tour, or go to Paris and Lourdes, or go to Rome and other shrines in Italy, but I think it's very difficult to combine the two in the time frame we're talking about - otherwise the whole trip will be spent in transit making difficult connections.

Dukey

For Lourdes they could fly into Paris and take a TGV south or they could connect in Paris to either Bordeaux or Toulouse flights and take the relatively easy rail connections (direct, no changes) from either of those cities to Lourdes itself.

flanneruk

Lourdes isn't quite as difficult to get to as it might appear in the US.

The local airport has few scheduled flights, usually only to Paris-Orly. But, from April to October, it has a HUGE influx of charter flights from the rest of Europe - including Italy. They aren't advertised on the web (Italy hasn't quite dragged itself into the 19th century), but the Lourdes tourist people do know about them, and will help you find one that might suit. Email [email protected], or fill in the form at http://www.tarbes-lourdes.aeroport.f...re_charter.asp

There's also a thriving industry in coach pilgrimages from Italy. Contact [email protected]

lovisa

On AirFrance you can ticket a flight to Pau (PUF), the nearest airport to Lourdes. On the AirFrance website I input 2 adults and 2 children JFK to Pau (switching CDG to Orly aiport in Paris), Pau to Rome (ROM - either airport), Rome to JFK in July, and it can to a total of $8,110 for airfare alone.