Help Please - 6 week Europe Itinerary

Go to rome2rio.com to check travel time between places, and bahn.de for train schedules and prices.

Ask yourself if this will be your only trip to Europe, or can you plan to return?

Your itinerary is heavy on cities with not much time for the countries they are in. For the distances you plan to cover, most travel days will be pretty full. If you really have six weeks, you have a few more days to play with, but I would add them to one or two of your two-night stays, since that is only one full day plus whatever is left of your travel day.

Hi,

Good choice of cities. How are you going from Lucerne to Berlin? Flying if that's an option, or the night train with one change in Basel, very doable, after which it's a direct shot to Berlin.

If you are not prepared to cull anything, then this forum isn't going to be much help, as the route you take will depend on your travel days. Why pay a travel agent? It's easy enough to book online rail and airfares, then you save money and get to see all the travel options. Use rome2rio.com and manatseat61.com for route planning. The value airlines such as Easyjet have had seats available for months for the summer, so the best prices will have sold out already. Fares don't go down.

You are travelling in school holidays, so places will be busier and more expensive - you will have more options if you could move it forward by a month. Italy, Spain and Greece will be very hot when you are planning on visiting.

London - day 1 will be getting over jet lag, so that only leaves 2 days for exploring a huge city. It may make sense to go to Amsterdam before Paris.

Every time you move on will take half a day at best, so for many places, you are only going to have one day there and most of the places deserve much longer. To save time and cost, please reconsider the Greek leg as this is out of the way and Santorini is by far from the most genuine Greek island, full of daily cruise ships. There are plenty of far nicer beach destinations closer to the remainder of your tour. Why not end in Italy or Spain and do your relaxing beach days here?

I'm totally with Zoe and Jennifer: allow yourself a more relaxed trip without the necessity of recovering at the end. Skipping Greece and over-touristy Cinque Terre gives you 9 days extra to extend your stay in the destinations of your choice and to have some relaxed days in the countryside or a smaller city. Put in Orvieto between Rome and Florence, or stay some days in or around Oberammergau in southern Germany. Interesting and rewarding things to do, without all the hectic of the big cities.
Do as much as possible by train. Use the pan-European railway planner on www.bahn.de/p_en/view/index.shtml for the schedules.

I'll go along with the others: too many locations which deserve more time than you've given them. And what with all the moving around, you're going to be packing up and moving on before you ever get acclimated to some of them. Jennifer is spot on: every move is going to eat up a 1/2 day or more, depending on distance.

I'd eliminate Greece as well and shuffle those 7 nights around to London, Rome, Florence, Munich, Lucerne and Prague. 2 nights are OK for the CT (you'll have one FULL day) but I'd get rid of as many other 2-nighters as possible, especially when changing countries.

You are going to get a lot of people telling you that this itinerary has too many locations that are too scattered about. I'm one of them.

Do check the rail and itinerary resources already listed. Those will give you an idea of how faaaaar apart many of these locations are and how long it will take to go between some of them. If you stick to this, you will need to fly...a lot. That will add costs and travel time. At least on a train you can see something of the countryside that you are going through. When flying, you have the same security issues as back home, the same requirements to get to the airport early, etc. And you see nothing along the way.

If you haven't bought your airline tickets yet, you might want to reconsider Greece. Do the online looking yourself. The only nonstop flight I see goes to NYC. Google Flights is a good source to get an idea of what's possible for multi-city flights from home to Europe and from Europe to home. Don't be seduced by super cheap flights like those on Aeroflot or Ukraine airlines. Those often have overnight stops in their home countries.

Google Flights also works for any internal European flights you want or need to take. Keep in mind that European airlines are cheap but much more restrictive on the sizes of luggage allowed both in the cabin and checked. And they do like to add costs on to those cheap fares.

The advice here usually is to pack light and carry-on as much as possible. That means you do not pack for a 6-week trip. You pack for a week or less and do laundry in the room or at a laundromat. You can also get it done at laundries where you drop it off and pick it up later. With your rushed list of places and short times there, you have very little time to take a breath and do laundry. Packing light and doing laundry sounds like a pain, but lugging a big bag on and off trains, trying to make connections is not the way to go.

Trip planning is an iterative process. Sometimes we can't go exactly where we want to exactly when we want to for any number of reasons. It's usually a teetering balance among money, time, and what we want to see and do in the places we go. Add in traveling in high season to lots of destinations, and it becomes even more complicated. I'm not sure travel agents are very useful any more for custom trips like the one you are planning. You need to do this yourself.

The main outlier I see on your itinerary is Greece. I'm not as negative about Santorini as others. It is beautiful. But I think you would do better to take those days and add them in to some of your other locations, giving you time to rest along the way instead of only at the end.

Please reconsider culling your destinations. I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I really feel you are trying to do too much in too little time. As mentioned above, two nights usually means only one full day at your destination. And all of your destinations deserve at least a minimum of three nights and many deserve four nights. In addition, going from Point A to Point B almost always takes more time than anticipated. You want to come back with really good memories of people, places, and things as opposed to a blurry memory of train stations and airports. Your plan is doable, but I'm afraid it will flat wear you out in addition to short changing you with regard to what is available to see and do. Just food for thought.

As others I think you got too many 2-nighters which translates into one full day. Too much moving and too little staying (with the exception of Santorini). If you don't mind that, I would leave it as it is. Otherwise I would eliminate with bleeding heart Cinque Terra and make Prague and Munich 3-nighters.

Lauri -- Is this your first Europe trip? Is there some reason you don't think you'll have other chances to visit Europe in the future? I'm not comfortable piling on, but, unless you feel like this is the only "trip of a lifetime" you'll get, I hope you'll take the advice above, to pare back the number of cities and give the remaining ones more time. With this itinerary you'll be spending all or part of 16 days on trains and/or planes, plus the stations, airports, shuttles and all the other stuff that goes with them. That's more than a third of all the days you have. You'll be checking into hotels or hostels 14 times, and checking out 14 times.

I agree with the suggestion to save Greece for another trip, and plan your relaxing time for a beach town in southern France or Spain or Italy. And maybe consider having that chill time in the middle of your trip, when recharging your batteries will make the rest of the trip more enjoyable, rather than at the end, when you're going home anyway.

Since you're looking at June and July, you might want to start in Italy or Spain when the weather's not as hot, and work north to places like Paris, Amsterdam, and London as the summer advances. The websites others have suggested can help you a lot with planning an efficient route among the places you really want most to see on this trip. However you organize it, I hope it's wonderful.

Here's my version of a 6 week trip using train only public transport.

Fly into Edinburgh
2 nights Edinburgh
3 nights Oban
4 nights London
4 nights Paris
3 nights Beaune
2 nights Annecy
2 nights Chamonix
2 nights Turin
4 nights Venice
2 nights Assisi
4 nights Rome
2 nights Siena
3 nights Florence
4 nights Ciqure Terre
2 nights Milan - fly home from Milan

This trip offers the diversity of seeing country, big cities, medium cities, small towns, mountains, the coast, and eat really amazing food all by train - with no overnight trains either. Your jet lag is spent in relatively relaxing Scotland and that should energize you for 8 straight days of mega city times, followed by nights in the country and mountains, as so on. That's my 2 cents.

-Matt

You are best to start in Italy in June, trying to avoid the heat of July, then work your way north, finishing up in London. My advice would be to forget Greece on this trip, substituting your time on Santorini with Spain's Costa Brava near Barcelona. Grab a cheap fare with easyjet for your flight from London to Barcelona.

Fly in to Rome
ROME - 3 nights,
FLORENCE - 2 nights,
VENICE - 3 nights,
CINQUE TERRE - 2 nights,
LUCERNE - 2 nights,
MUNICH -2 nights,
PRAGUE - 3 nights,
BERLIN - 3 nights,
AMSTERDAM - 3 nights,
PARIS - 4 nights,
LONDON - 4 nights,
Fly to
BARCELONA - 4 nights,
COSTA BRAVA - 4 nights (for end of tour beach recovery time instead of Santorini)
Fly home from Barcelona

Hello Lauri_1710. You said you can be at Europe a total of 6 weeks. I think that is wonderful ! I like the travel route suggested by David at Brisbane. (Do not go to Greece). That would be a total of 8 countries. I would tweak your travel route. In Italy, ride in trains from Rome -> Cinque Terre village (via Pisa and La Spezia train stations, the coastal route) -> Florence -> Lucerne -> ... I suggest do not go to Venice. It does not fit in your travel route, and I think being at Venice is not essential in a big trip in Europe. Plan to be at a Cinque Terre village 3 nights for you to have two whole days at the Cinque Terre. Plan to be at London 4 nights minimum. Plan to be at Rome 4 nights minimum. That would give you 2 whole days in Rome, plus a day trip by train from Rome to the hill town Orvieto. I think you will wish to be in Switzerland more than 2 nights, for you to have time for going to a place where you can have a good view of Alps mountains. It is possible to travel, in trains, from Florence to Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland (near Interlaken) in one day. Be at Lauterbrunnen 3 nights, and be at Lucerne 2 nights.

Thank you all for taking the time to reply! I cannot see us being able to do Europe again anytime soon and Greece was the place i was most looking forward to so for that reason i have decided to keep it on the list. However after reading all your feedback i have decided to remove Lucerne and Munich and add the extra days to other locations. I now have at least 4 nights in most locations :)

thank you again for all your advice and feedback!