Traveling My Way – Finding Flights and booking Hotel Rooms

Part 3 

We have our basic time established so I started looking for flights. The flight schedules start coming out about 11 months prior to the flight. Around late October I started looking and early Nov I found flights and pricing. I like to use Google and type in “Airfare Search engines”. All of the third party booking sites will pop up. They give you flights and prices for most of the airlines. Google has Google Flights which gives information on multiple flights. After looking here I decided to fly on United. I have silver status with them and that gives me some perks on domestic flights such as early boarding and first checked baggage is free. On this search United was right there with the most economical flights and I already have my frequent flyer number. I like to go to the airline itself and book my flights. United has a five day window so it gives you comparison prices 2 days before and after the date you select. If I had some flexibility I might have be able to save a little money checking these dates and could have used the savings for dining, hotels and souvenirs. But I didn’t want to leave any earlier than Friday or later than Saturday, so I didn’t have much flexibility.
After looking at United we decided to fly out of New Orleans, LA. on Friday, September 22, 2017 and arrive in Frankfurt on Saturday, September 23 and fly out of Venice Italy on Saturday, October 7 2017. The initial costs for the 2 tickets was $2022.00 but with taxes, fees, Premium economy on the longest flight and trip insurance our total flight cost is $2884.72 for the both of us.

Selecting and booking hotels.

Cochem Germany

We have flights booked so we know the exact time we will arrive in Europe and when we will depart for home. Now we need to decide where we will stay and for how long. We have a couple of cities determined and need to make a few decisions. First is where to stay in the Rhine River valley. Since I do most of the planning I like to pick out a few places and then we will decide together. I picked out a few towns. Cochem on the Mosel River, Bingen, Rudeshiem and Boppart on the Rhine River. I know that Rosita’s main goal is to see some old towns and castles. One way is to go to lists on the internet. I typed in phrases such as “best towns in the rhine river valley”, “best places to visit in Germany’, etc. Put in criteria for what you like in a place to visit and you will see multiple lists of some places you will like and some you won’t. A great resource for finding a town and a hotel, B&B or apartment is Tripadvisor. I set up an account with Tripadvisor and can now save hotels, towns, etc to go back and look at. When I am looking at hotels, I like to save all of the possibilities. Then Rosita and I will go look at these and narrow them down until we select a hotel. Airbnb is growing into a huge company but I have not tried them yet. My goal when I retire is to go to Italy for a month and stay for at least half of this time in one apartment. I will probably give them a try then. We eventually chose Cochem as our town to stay in. We looked Mainly at Tridadvisor and selected a hotel. if you go to your search engine and type in hotels and your city of choice you will see many options for 3rd party booking sites. We chose Hotel Germania as our hotel and went to their website to book on December 4 for 544,00 € for 4 nights. Right now the exchange rate for US Dollars to Euros is 1.05 Dollar to 1 Euro. This makes this room cost $571.20. We will pay for the room when we check out so the exchange rate could change. The trend in the past few years has been in favor of the US Dollar so hopefully the room will cost less. Some hotels let you prepay now and the advantage is you know exactly what your cost is and the disadvantage is you have to pay early and for this hotel it would be almost 10 months early. We selected this hotel because of its proximity to the local railroad station and it has a balcony and a view of the Mosel River. Just a caution here is that when you go to the hotel website, most all of them have English translations but sometimes everything does not make it through the translator. I went to google looked up a good German to English translator. In this instance I learned that DOPPELZIMMER, NICHTRAUCHER, MOSELBLICK MIT BALKON means Double room, no smoking with a Balcony and a view of the Mosel River. You can smoke on the balcony if you want to.

While in Cochem, I like to make a list of the things I would like to do here. The thing I want to do and these are on my bucket list and is to try some German beer and eat some sausage. We also plan to take a train to Bingen or Rudesheim, look around the city and take a river cruise down the Rhine River. For the first 30 miles from here there are at least 30 castles. We plan to stop and explore a couple. On another day we will explore Cochem and the castle that overlooks Cochem. On the third day we will decide while we are there. One option is to take a train to Trier, Germany or to Luxembourg and take a cruise back or come back by train. Another option is to further wander around Cochem and sample some local cuisine or wine or beer. Another option is take a train to a nearby town and explore. We will ask local people for suggestions and look for a local tourist center for suggestions.

Lucerne(Luzern) Switzerland

We have our first hotel and and the date I will be checking into a hotel in Switzerland. While doing a search of top towns in Switzerland I landed on Interlaken and Lucerne (Lucerne is the English name and you will see it spelled this way when looking at Google maps and on US based web sites, but when you are booking train travel through the Swiss Railroad site the spelling will be Luzern. I will get more into this when I go over booking train travel). Lucerne won out because it has 2 Marriott properties there and Interlaken has none. I travel a lot for my day job and stay in hotels 60 to 80 nights a year and stay in Marriott properties and use a Marriott rewards Visa card to pay some of my expenses. There is the Hotel Lucerne and The Renaissance Lucerne Hotel. We pick the Renaissance mainly because of proximity to the Railroad Station and the Hotel Lucerne has some weird paintings on the wall. The artwork looks good but is a little too much to me. After we looked over things to do in Lucerne Rosita decided she would like to stay 3 nights instead of the 2 we originally planned. The rate for this hotel is 250 CHF per night or 120,000 points per stay. I am going to use points and it will cost me 120,000 points plus 23.70 CHF for the stay. The exchange rate for the US Dollar vs the Swiss Franc. is .98 USD vs 1 CHF so my cost for the 3 nights is $23.23. I booked the room on Dec 30.

On one day in Lucerne we are going to take a scenic route on the Golden Pass line to Montreux Switerland and on the second day there we plan to explore the city of Lucerne.

Florence(Firenze) Italy

On to finding a room in Florence Italy. I start looking on TripAdvisor and looked for the top hotels in Florence. The one that stood out to me at first was Hotel David. It has one of the top hotel rankings and is within our budget. We wanted to keep the 4 night room cost below $1,000. Everything was right with it except it was a little outside of the city center. Many of the other top hotels in our chosen location are outside of our budget so we settled on 5 hotels that we saved in Tripadvisor. Rosita and I spent a couple of hours on the evening of Jan 1 and settled on these five. We decided to back away and come back later and pick one. The next day we whittled them down to Hotel Tornabuoni Beacci and Pontevecchio Relais, The Hotel Tonabuoni Beacci looked like a much nicer hotel with a very good complimentary breakfast and some nice rooms and common ground. But the Pontevecchio Relais had a room available with balcony with a view of the Ponte Vecchio Bridge and the Arno River. We decided to go with the view. We booked the hotel on January 2 for 680.40 EUR. This will cost us $714.42 at the current exchange rate.

In Florence the one thing we will do is go see Michelangelo’s statue of David, we will also explore the rest of the city and I want to eat a tripe sandwich with some local wine. Also Florence is famous for its steak. We will have a large TBone steak, or bistecca alla Fiorentina as it is called in Florence, one night. We also want to explore the city and visit some of the museums. On at least one day we want to take a train to a nearby city and explore. One city I have in mind is Lucca, I did some research on Lucca for our previous trip to Italy but decided to go somewhere else.
On 4/23 I purchased tickets to Accademia Museum which is where the statue of David is and to the Uffizi Museum. We will go to the Accedemia on the morning of 10/3 and to the Uffizi on the afternoon of the same day. I went to the web site http://www.b-ticket.com/B-Ticket/uffizi/ and purchased 2 tickets to each for a total of 57,00 EU.

Venice(Venezia) Italy

We definitely want to spend at least 3 nights in Venice so now we are settled on 4 nights in Florence and 3 nights in Venice. We are now settled on how many nights we will be in each town during the trip. I started looking in Venice first because I had an idea where I wanted to stay. During our last trip to Italy we stayed in Marriott Boscolos in Rome and Milan and really enjoyed them. There is a Boscolo in Venice but on our last trip it was not available to book with points. We will be in Venice October 4 through the 7th and when I look the Venice Boscolo is available with use of points . I immediately booked the hotel on Jan 1. This hotel is going to cost me 135,000 Marriott reward points and 30 EUR for the 3 nighty stay. This hotel stay will cost me $31.50 based off of the current exchange rate.

This will put my total hotel costs for the 2 week trip at $1,340.35. Our airfare cost is $2884.72 so with hotel and flight our total expense now is $4,225.07. Our budget is looking good but we are going to be booking a lot of train travel next and it will probably be our second highest expense for the trip.

While in Venice we want to go to the nearby island of Murano. This island is famous for blowing glassware. We looked into this on our last trip, but did not have the time. On one day we want to get up early and try to get lost wandering the city. The city is an island so you can’t get really lost.
If you were to go to one general location you would save considerable money on train travel. Also generally if you fly into and out of the same location you can save some money. When I booked the airfare I did a quick look to see how much the airfare would be if we flew into Frankfurt and back from the same airport. It looked like we would have saved around $500 but since we are traveling to Italy, going back to Frankfurt would have cost us most of the savings plus the time to travel back.

Next Part 4 Booking Train Travel

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