Yesterday, we purchased our airline tickets, so we are now locked into our arrival city (Paris, France) and the departure city (Frankfurt, Germany). These cities are the arrival and departure points listed in the latest Itinerary Map on the previous post, so we are committed to that plan, only making small changes to the stops withing the arrival and departure constraints if we see the need. It was disappointing to see the airfare prices, they have gone up considerably since our last flights to Europe two years ago. I guess with the ever increasing fuel costs, and apparent high demand for flights to Eurpoe, the prices are just higher. All in all, it still seems to be a cost effective way to cover that kind of distance, or at least we keep thinking so to justify the expense.
We had considered trying to fit in a night train somewhere in the itinerary, but it was just not feasible. We looked at the night train from Prague to Zurich, with departure on our flight home from Zurich instead of Frankfurt, but it meant cutting something else out in the portion of the trip between our stop in Fussen, Germany, and our flight home.
Then, we considered eliminating Prague, and substituting in a trip to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. However, the airfare home from Amsterdam was about $150 more per person, so that nixed that idea.
Like any trip planning effort, there are pluses and minuses, and no itinerary is ever perfect. Now we will just accept the plan we have made, and work on putting together the details of what we want to see at each stop along the way. As was mentioned earlier, we may consider changing a day or two inside of the plan, but that is less likely as we concentrate on firming up the details.
We still have a hotel to choose in Prague, we had been delaying that task to make sure that Prague stayed in the planned itinerary. Finding a hotel in Prague will now be one of our next tasks. Also, we need a hotel in Augsburg, Germany for our one night stay there prior to Munich, and a hotel near the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, now that we have confirmed Frankfurt for our departure city. Once these three hotels are reserved, all of the hotel accommodations will be covered.
Due to the added expense of our unexpected early departure from Germany two years ago, we are considering travel insurance for this trip. We are usually not really”pro travel insurance” but with the costs of changing flights, one potential flight change more than pays for the cost of the insurance. We did obtain insurance for the last trip, the cruise to Hawaii, Samoa and French Polynesia, since we were going to be so far from home, and the cost of any type of medical evacuation or family emergency would have been very costly from a remote location like Tahiti. It is expensive to get to French Polynesia when you elect to go there, but it can be outrageously expensive for any type of unexpected emergency evacuation.
One of the additional benefits of travel insurance is that we may consider booking non-refundable reservations for some of the hotels, or elect to choose a different hotel that we may have liked during our planning search, but whose rates were only non-refundable. There can be a significant savings in the nightly rate for some hotels using non-refundable rates. The incremental cost of the travel insurance is about $49/$1000 of coverage, so it may be worth it to increase the policy limits and include some of the hotels that may have a less expensive non-refundable rate. It was interesting to note that the travel insurance only needs to cover the non-refundable amounts to be incurred for the travel, which at this point for us is the airfare only. All of the reservations we have made so far can be cancelled within a couple of days of our arrival, so we do not need to insure 100% of their value, at least not yet. We will put together a cancellation schedule and running total of the hotel cancellation costs for the trip realizing that, should an emergency occur that causes us to return home early, we would need a couple of days to rearrange our flights. This was our experience previously, we could not depart for about 2 days due to flight availability. So, we will look at the cost for the hotels on an ongoing three day window to set up our trip insurance coverage limits.
We will post updates on a regular basis from now until the trip approaches, more than likely only once or twice a month as we add details to our plans.
The next task will be to put together train travel information for the cost and schedules between the various cities in the itinerary. There are some very good websites to assist with this effort. We already have usernames and logins for the major train companies for France (SNCF), Germany (DB-Bahn) and Switzerland (SBB), and it is always interesting to try and arrange for tickets in advance on some of these sites, especially SNCF. I suppose that any pre-purchased train tickets will need to be added to the travel insurance coverage. There is usually about a 90 day window for advance reservations, prior to the travel date, and although there is some risk on cost (that is what the insurance is for), the non-refundable, advance train reservation discounts can be considerable.
Stay tuned for more information as we firm up the detailed plans.