Travel to Austria, Germany and Italy

Flying into one destination and home from another is called, "open jaw," and it can be found on airline websites by clicking on "multiple destinations." It is usually advocated by posters on this site, because it saves you the time and expense of getting back to the original entry city. It is usually negligibly, if at all, more expensive than a round trip. You can check with the airlines, as well as sites such as kayak.com to get a sense of prices. United and Lufthansa have direct flights from SFO to Frankfurt, maybe Munich, as well, and from there to other points in Germany. There are many budget airlines connecting various smaller airports in Europe. You'll have to do a little research to find out which ones go to the places you want and at what prices. Also, it would be well to ask here and look on the Tripadvisor forums for travelers' ratings of those lines. To get to Verona, I suggest checking out flights to both Venice and Milan, the former being preferable. Venice to Verona by train is not a very long journey, 1 hour? It might be possible for you to start your return trip from the Florence airport, or more likely, the larger Pisa airport.

Joan,

The easiest way to arrange the trip (IMO) would be to fly inbound to Munich, Frankfurt or Vienna and outbound from Milan, Florence, Pisa or Venice (although Venice is not usually the best chocie because flights typically leave quite early in the morning).

Travel from Germany to Verona is VERY easy by rail. There are many direct trains each day, with a travel time of about 5H:15M (Savings fares currenntly advertised at €49 PP).

Some further information would be helpful, such as when this trip will be taking place, where you'll be visiting and the duration of the trip.

Happy travels!

What do you want to see in Austria? The logical plan would be fly into Munich and home from Milan. Just for grins, I looked at a 2 week round trip in May and came up with a price of $921 which is an unbelievable price these days. Bonus is 24 hours in Copenhagen on the way home (its on SAS).

Look at rail connections at www.bahn.com, the German railway co. It has all the European schedules on its website. For journeys under 6 hours, trains are much more convenient and relaxing than flying. Different people have there own time criterion, some are 4 hours, some 5, mine is 6. You can work your way to Italy through Austria, making short hops to visit what you want to see and end up in Verona. Its one of the 2 main hubs for trains running between Germany and Italy through the Alps.

Pisa is closer to Florence than Milan, but airline tickets can be cheaper from this much bigger airport. You'll have to play around with Kayak or ITA-Matrix to get a feel for airline prices and schedules. Milan is easy to get to from Florence by high speed train, and has a rail connection to the airport from the city center.

Welcome to the Helpline Joan!

Since you are asking about flying from either San Francisco or Sacramento, I will assume you live somewhere in the Sacramento area. There is a group of us in the area that connected through the Helpline. We have been meeting in Sacramento monthly for 3 1/2 years, always on the 3rd Saturday of the month. We are well traveled and are happy to help people with their trip questions. Larry from Elk Grove is a train whiz and he is an invaluable wealth of information. I always post the meeting information under the General Europe heading about 7-10 days before the meeting. You might consider coming to a meeting (or as many as you'd like!) to run your trip by us.

I've done a similar trip to yours in reverse, and took the train from Verona to Munich. The scenery was beautiful!