Multi Country/City trip in Europe in Sept 2025

It seems that you want to cover a very large area. How long is your planned trip?

almost 17-18 days.

nkns.2074,
You list 10 cities in 17-18 days. That is about 1 1/2 days per city, and intercity travel time isn't accounted for. Do you mean that these are possibilities and need help choosing among them?

Apply Rick's formula for trip planning. List the places you want to visit. Then list what you want to see and do in each of those places to determine how many nights you will need to spend in each place. Next add in travel time between places, including time between the last hotel and the next one. This will give you the total number of days and nights needed. Now adjust for the total amount of time you have available. This may require omitting activities in some places and/or omitting some places entirely. Or, if you can, adding extra days to your vacation. As it is, I think your itinerary is too ambitious for the time available.

Nice choice of destinations.

Figure on average, 3 nights per city. That is you arrive mid-day on day one, spend the night, go sightseeing the next day then spend second night, then sightseeing the third day and spend night 3, then you are off to the next city the following day. So you have 2.5 days (more or less in each city …. On average). Some of the stops will do better with 4 nights and there might be one or two you feel good about with 2 nights. 10 cities x average/3 nights each = 30 nights. Ooops!!!

I see that you have 3 trip options with your list without adding more nights. Logistics and getting from point A to point B work well with:

TRIP A: pretty much uses up all of your time after we toss in a few smaller stops along the way.

• Zurich
• Lucienne
• Munich (Oktoberfest)
• Salzburg

TRIP B: also pretty much uses up all of your time after we toss in a few smaller stops along the way.

• Salzburg
• Vienna
• Budapest
• Prague
  

TRIP C: Zagreb is one of those places that is difficult to reach so its best done with the Balkan states. I would add Montenegro to your list and then it would use your time well. But you mentioned Octoberfest, not really the best time of the year for the Balkans. You miss out on the interaction with the water.

• Zagreb
• Spit
• Dubrovnik
• Montenegro

Also look at costs for each trip. You will see that one of them will be substantially more expensive than the others.

nkns.2074
What CJean said.

Lots of great Recs. Thank you everyone very much. Any recs for hotels and rental car from Zurich? What if we return rental car to different city? Zurich, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Budapest, Split and Dubrovnik? We are limiting # of cities. Some cities we will do day and half and others more.

If you pick it up in Lucerne and drop it off in Dubrovnik, i would suspect the drop off fee to be between 500 and 1000 euro.

Dropping a rental car in any place outside the country you picked up from will result in a heavy surcharge like Mr E mentioned. And some rentals companies dont allow you to take their cars into certain countries. Is there some reason why you are driving everywhere instead of taking trains, especially when crossing borders? And many people would mention the difficulty of having a car in large European cities, and the difficulty/expense of parking.