travel from Vienna to Venice

It looks like there's one train a day this summer that leaves Vienna at 6:25am and arrives in Venice at about 2:05 for a total travel time of 7 hours 40 minutes. I'm a big train advocate - I'll usually take the train when I can. However, I was going to say I'd fly this one until I just checked flight info. The budget airlines don't seem to cover this route. I see that Austrian flies it - random date checks for this summer show a price of about $350 per ticket, which is pretty steep. The advance purchase train price I saw for a few random dates was 49 Euros per person.

How many of you are there? Do you have any other flights to purchase? I priced a one-way flight - if you have another flight to Vienna or from Venice, perhaps you can purchase an open-jaw flight that could bring the price down.

We travelled from Venice to Vienna last year and throughly enjoyed the trip. We boarded a double-decker bus (coach and first class) in Venice and drove to the nearest town just over the border in Austria. the drive was very pleasant but I was surprised by how many tunnels there were. Once in Austria we boarded a train that took us to the Westbahnhof in Vienna. It was an absolutely beautiful ride through the mountains on Southern Austria--one of our all time favorite train trips!

If you want to leave later in the morning and do not want the bus (I am not a bus person) you can route through Innsbruck - it is about an hour longer...but no bus!