Hello. I have received some great info from this board while planning my 1st Europe trip. My husband and I are doing London, Paris, Rome and Venice. We have been told to fly from Washington DC (near our home) to London, train to Paris, fly to Venice, train to Rome and fly back. Is this the best way to get around? Also, which airports are the best? Also, we are thinking about cutting out Venice to have more time in Rome (only a 2 week trip). It seems really expensive to fly from Rome to home, is there a cheaper alternative? Thanks!

What are you calling expensive, and are you looking at 1 way tickets, or a multi-city itinerary when you look for flights?

I did a quick search on www.kayak.com for an open jaw ticket for a random date next April

IAD to LHR
FCO to IAD

total price $785.

London airports have a big departure tax, so what you have planned sounds good.

When you buy an open jaw ticket (into one city and back from another) you typically pay half of the roundtrip fare to each city. Naturally the RT fare to Rome is higher than that to London - it's further.

But don't know why you're pricing them separately - this must be bought as a single ticket.

As long as you're sticking to major cities training between makes sense. (We usually do road trips - but we do more days over less territory and stop to see smaller towns and countryside as well as major cities.)

Did you mention when you are planning to go?

I picked random dates in March and British Airways has an open-jaw ticket for $573 (IAD-LHR nonstop, FCO-IAD via LHR). I doubt you will find a round trip to LHR for much less than that.

If you want to go nonstop for both legs, it's $741 on United.

In sum, open-jaw is usually the way to go, and it's almost always going to be cheaper than taking another flight to get you back to your starting point (LHR in this case).

For me, with only two weeks, I'd fly to Paris (skip London) for 5 days, fly or overnight train to Venice for 4 days, train to Rome for 5 days and fly home from Rome.