redrover

My husband and I will be traveling to Prague, Vienna & Budapest in August. We do not yet have plane reservations. I found a flight on Czech airlines from Budapest to JFK with a change of planes in Prague and only 45 minutes between flights. Has anyone done this? Is it crazy to try to make this work?

Also, we will be traveling from city to city by train. How can we make those reservations before we go? Is it smart to do that?

Thanks a million for all the great info on this site.

doug_stallings

Have you considered flying in and out of Vienna on Austrian Airlines? You can often get good package deals on this flight, and Vienna has the advantage of being roughly in the middle between Prague and Budapest. Then if you really need to fly from Prague to Budapest (or vice versa), book a cheap ticket on Smartwings. If you book a month or so ahead, this flight should cost you about 70 euros, which isn't too much more than the train fare.

I usually prefer to buy train tickets in Europe to avoid ridiculously high service charges from Rail Europe. If you buy your tickets in Vienna (or wherever you land) on the day you arrive (assuming it's a few days before you need to travel) and are remotely flexible about timing, you don't really need to buy your tickets in advance unless you're traveling on a busy holiday (or on Friday or Sunday). In August, it's a bit more iffy, though, becuase so many people travel then.

buongiorno

I just got back from Budapest, Vienna and Prague. We flew into Budapest and trained from Budapest to Vienna and from Vienna to Prague and flew home from Prague. We flew Lufthansa.
You can buy the train tickets when you go. I suggest you get reserved seats. Buy both tickets when you arrive in Budapest. The train from Budapest to Vienna is about 3 hours and from Vienna to Prague about 4 hours.

Whatever you do, don't use the taxis that hang out at the taxi stand at the Prague train station. They are crooks. Use only City Taxi or AAA Taxi that have a phone number on the side of the cab. The bandits at the Prague Holesevice train station will try to charge you 800 Czech Crowns for a 200 Czech Crown ride by a reputable taxi company.

SomewhereOutThere

Hi redover, 45 min is too short for the layover in Prague. We recently flew from Budapest to Atlanta, with a 2 hour layover in Prague. We were on Czech Air for the first leg, Delta for the second leg. We had to stand in security lines for almost an hour in Prague, and they made us get new boarding passes printed, even though we'd gotten boarding passes for our final flight in Budapest.

Re train tickets...if you don't want to wait to buy in Europe, see the info I posted before we took our trip at this link http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...here&fid=2 . The tickets we purchased through Budget Europe Travel Service cost a bit more than we would have paid if we'd purchased in Europe, but they worked out great.

SomewhereOutThere

For some reason, that link doesn't seem to be working. If you want to read the info on purchasing train tickets, click on my name and pull up the 4/22/07 post called Transportation Decision.