Multi-City Flights, Prices, and Days to Travel?

Most of the old posters on this site are independent, self planners, and seldom if ever use travel agents. Have no idea whether it is cost effective to use a TA or not. Generally open jaw tickets are equal to or cheaper than round trip tickets when you factor in the return costs. RT tickets work best if you are staying in a particular area of city and doing day trips. You are covering a lot of territory and it would make little sense to use either Paris or Rome as a RT trip. You first step should be to get the guidebooks, the DVDs, etc. and spend sometime deciding what you want to see and do. Without knowing you time period it is hard to make any recommendations. Personally I would stay in Paris area -- London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris or Rome,Florence, Venice, etc.. What you are suggesting has a lot of travel so you will spend a lot of time in transit. Save one or the other for another trip. Some will recommend the use of the budget airlines which can be very cheap but come with a lot of restrictions on luggage, checkin, etc. which can add to the expense if you are not careful. We prefer to travel by train but do not do great distances. Good luck. You need to do more homework.

Yes, you need to do more homework. That said, I don't know how far you are from Edmonds, WA but there is where Rick is based and they have travel planners who can really help you out, they might even do it over the phone. Believe me, it will save you a lot of time and money to try that. If nothing else at least get the ETBD book to start with.

As Frank said, open-jaw flights would suit your itinerary. They are easy to book on-line. You may have to change planes - don't know how many (if any) airlines fly non-stop from Seattle to both Paris and Rome. I have occasionally used a travel agent to book more "complicated" routes. You only pay them if you buy the tickets through them. Often the prices are about the same. The benefit of a good agent is that s/he can put together flight packages. Nice seems pretty "out-of-the-way." You're likely to use up one day just getting there, another getting to Venice. There are budget airlines in Europe. Take a look at those prices. Paris-Nice, Nice-Venice, Paris-Venice. One caveat, flights within Europe will limit your baggage allowance to one 20 kg. checked bag and one carry-on (sometimes there are size and/or weight limits much lower than on trans-Atlantic flights). There's good train service in Italy. Use trenitalia.com to find out travel times and prices between Venice and Rome. Night trains are usually not a good idea. Few people get much sleep on them, so what you save in travel time gets lost the day when you are too tired to enjoy anything. That said, how long is your trip? 2 weeks - doable, with Venice, but I'd still leave out Nice.

Hi Cory, In general, people on this board will suggest flying 'open jaw' (aka, multi-city) where you would fly into Paris and then out of Rome or vice versa. You can check sites such as www.kayak.com and choose the 'mulit-city' option to start getting ideas of ticket prices. Once you arrive, to get between those cities and make your stops, either the trains or low cost airlines (such as Easy Jet), would work the best. Many people here take the trains unless your stops are really spread out (which yours seem to be). However, without knowing your time frame it is difficult to know if you may want to save Nice and/or Venice for another trip. Could you please give us more trip details? That would help us to help you more. :) P.S. ** If you decide to try a lost cost airline: One caveat about the low-cost airlines is, however, is that they often use a secondary city airport so they may be farther out from the city center than the primary airport.

On my last trip to europe in june I booked a flight from LAX-CDG with a stop over in Paris(3 days). My 2rd flight from CDG to Geneva where I spent 2 weeks in Switzerland. My last flight was from Zurich-CDG-LAX. The price was better (300$) than if I booked a round trip ticket to Paris. For my upcoming oct trip I will be going from LAX-Istanbul with a plane change in CDG. Coming back I will do a 1 week layover in Paris before heading back home. Most airline will allow a 3rd flight without costing you much more money.
You could try to book a ticket from Seattle-Rome with a stop over in Paris after Rome. To get to Venice I would take the high speed train and then use my 3rd leg to fly from Venice-CDG.

1) "Cost effective" rather than just "cheaper" implies you could get added value from using a travel agent that is greater than the commissions you will pay the agent. This is entirely possible, depending on your stomach for planning stuff (lots of us here like that part) and your skill at booking things like air. But there is no simple answer to the "cost effective" part because that depends on you. I do think there is merit to the argument that the more you personally dig into the nitty-gritty details, the better your trip will be for you. You might start with Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door, even if you do use the services of a travel agent. 2) I suspect your suspicion is wrong, and that flying out of Rome will be cheaper and easier. But you can find out pretty easily online. For trains, I note that there is a night train from Paris to Venice (for itinerary #1), but sadly no longer one from Nice to Venice (as in #2). You could also investigate flying from Paris (I have no idea if there is a cheap air route or not). But however you get to Italy, I'll bet flying home from Rome is your best bet.

"First question is: Would it be cost effective to book with a travel agent to let them figure all this stuff out?"It depends on how good a job you do on your own. I beat Rick's travel agent years ago on both flight price and time. "Do you just end up paying the agent the difference in savings they might find you?" No. Agents no longer earn commissions on airfare and will charge you for their service. Agree to a price in advance. "If someone does recommend an agent, is there a specific agent you can personally recommend?"I gave up agents years ago.

To provide some info... I've planned almost a month long trip in England myself, never staying in one place more than two nights... so I'm comfortable researching and planning out complicated itineraries and looking for good deals (2 of us in the UK for almost a month for about 5k) so I guess my main question really is are the travel agents going to do all the travel (flights/rail) work for me for the same price? Obviously I can just get a quote from one and compare it to what I find, but I figured I'd ask here first. The trip will likely be in late August/early September of 2012 and is tentatively planned to be our honeymoon (provided dates/times work out). We may just make it simple and do Paris/Rome as I would like to go to Venice during Carnival in October sometime and we may, in the future, simply plan a separate Mediterranean trip that would move up the coast from Italy, to France, to Spain, to Portugal. I will probably look into renting an apartment as they are just as cost effective as a decent hotel in Paris. I need to research if the same is feasible in Rome. We are in the Seattle area, so I am leaning towards a day trip up to the Edmonds center and talking to them.

Byron You mention on your last trip you were to Istanbul. This is one of the cities I want to get to at some point and may even consider a couple days side trip on what we are looking at if it make sense. What would you tell someone who knows little about the city other than a few places they know they want to see (the market and Hagia Sophia for example)? Cory

Oh, and yes, the trip would be two weeks. I'm leaning towards: Paris, Rome and a side trip that would just be rail based out of one of those two places (or a very short flight). Venice and a small possibility of Istanbul (hadn't thought about that until Byron mentioned the city). Cory

I will not be going to Istanbul till oct when I will be taking the RS city tour of Istanbul. When I first looked on the internet at the price from LAX-CDG-Istanbul I thought I could wait and get a better price. Unfortu nately the cost kept going up due to the rising cost of fuel. By the time I finally booked the trip for 2 it cost me 1500$ more for business class seats.

Oops, messed up the month on Carnival... had Halloween on the brain while I was typing that apparently (fiancee is a huge Halloween fan). I'm kind of so-so on going to Venice in the winter months, but being a photographer I REALLY want to go there during Carnival.

Are you a AAA member? If so check out their travel agents. Your member benfits cover alot!!!

Sometimes you can get a trip like the one the OP describes booked as a round-trip ticket at no or little additional cost. I recently booked a trip CPH-MIA-ORD-CPH with 2 weeks stop in MIA and one week in ORD. Technically, the trip is booked as a round-trip CPH-MIA-CPH with a one week stop-over in ORD on the return. The price was the same as a simple return ticket to MIA as the stop-over was free. Some website are better than others for these kind of multi-city bookings. I used ebookers.

Just a note - Venice is romantic. Carnival is in late January or February (the two weeks before Ash Wednesday).

I would book an open jaw, into Paris out of Rome. From Paris I would fly to Venice or Rome ( and then train to Venice) on a low cost airline, I flew one way Paris to Rome for 80 euros a few years ago,, it was easy. I flew on Vueling. My husband has used Tuifly and Airberlin in Europe too. Packing light is important when using any low cost airline, read conditions of luggage acceptance completely.. I found out that if my bag was too heavy for carry on, the fee for it going on the plane was more expensive if they had to do it on flight day, then if I had prebooked it as cargo so to speak. I book my own stuff, while travel agents no longer get commission, but charge a set fee,, they don't really have the incentive to get you the best deal as that may take a little longer then just doing some extra research. If you want you could do the research on best prices available yourself then go to an agent to purchase, I would never do that, but some people like the idea that a travel agent will help them if there is a problem while away,, frankly , sometimes there is nothing they could do that you couldn't do yourself but people like the service.