Taking a 10 day tour of Italy

We can help but you give us no info.
Where exactly are you going? When? Where do you fly from? What is your budget?
The more details you give us the better we can advise.

So sorry, as you can see first time doing this. I was going to fly into Venice, then go to Florence and end in Rome returning home from there, just like the tour. Would like to go mid to end of May 2017 and preferably 10 days in Italy . Leaving out of JFK and budget would be around 2500 to 3000 per person not including flight.

So you're not booking the RS tour, right? You're doing this on your own?
How many nights in Italy do you have to work with?
And 'best' as far as what?
What sorts things are you wanting to do?

A 10-night plan for these three cities is usually pretty straightforward; I'd say 3 nights Venice, 3 nights Florence, 4 nights Rome, flying into Venice and out of Rome. How long to stay in each city can depend on specific interests, though.

Booking hotels is not difficult; many of us like booking.com for doing that (my husband and I have used that one a lot). I think it's helpful not to leave that piece flexible as it's more efficient, and sometimes more economical, to book those before you go, IMHO. I already know that apartments are going to be recommended by some members as you are three adults who may enjoy more room but if you're OK with sharing the same space, you'll want to be looking at 'family room' offerings as they're bigger. Apartments are fine but first-timers are often more comfortable having the 24/7 support (or even just daytime/evening support) of a hotel desk.

You'll want to travel between the cities by train; a topic worth a separate thread once you get your itinerary nailed.

I agree that for first-time visitors, a hotel or B&B can be more comfortable than an apartment, especially since you are staying only a few nights in each city. Plus, you won't need to worry about appliance training or blowing up the apartment because you plugged in two appliances at the same time.

I use booking.com a lot, be sure to note there are often two price levels: one is non-cancellation/non-refundable, one allows cancellations up to a specific date. I always get the free cancellation option, even though it's a few euro more. I have needed their customer service help twice and it was excellent both times.

Count nights, not days; a night is always a night, a day can be a couple of hours of usable time or a full 7am-midnight (and beyond) sightseeing schedule.

I booked a lot of my next trip's accommodations a few months ago, so I would get familiar with the booking service website (how to filter is especially useful).

Rick has a 1`0 Day Venice Florence & Rome tour at the end of May $3195 plus air which is real close to your budget.Rick handles the hotels and the transportation you enjoy Italy.
The Heart of Italy in 9 Days costs even less.
So depending on where you wanted to go in Italy these tours might be an answer to what seems to be your primary concern.

Rick's tours are low stress and lots of fun plus you end up with a fun small group of fellow tour buddies. Look at the tour section of this site if you have not already done so for more information and tour reviews. .

($3195 + air) x 3 people. OMG - you can do it yourself for a fraction of that.

Booking a hotel is no more difficult than click on the "BOOK" button on the hotel website. Or use some other reliable booking engine like www.booking.com

Transportation is so absolutely easy and CHEAP to book yourself. Those train trips can be hand for as low as 9Euros one way by booking early on www.trenitalia.com

My advice is to let your 20 year old college son book these things for you. Let your son put in dates, times, credit cards and press the button. It's all so very simple.

I think RS is a pretty great person. But when you start booking your own things easily and cheaply you'll see exactly why RS is a millionaire :-)

Train transportation Venice-Florence-Rome is very, very easy and frequent, and you can do this yourself very easily. Since this is your first trip, I recommend Rick's "Europe Through the Back Door" (to read at home as soon as possible) and "Italy 2017" (to take the pertinent chapters with you--or get the ebook version).

This trip can come in way, way under budget. If it's the budget that is keeping the trip to just 10 days, add more time! There's so much to see, even if you limit yourself to the three cities you've mentioned. You'll be sorry not to have more time.

With a $7500-$9000 budget not including air, unless you're shopping maniacs and gourmet diners and need a separate room for your son, you're made in the shade!

But...to do it efficiently and cost-effectively, you need to get started right about now. Work your way in starting with the air. Open-jaw, JFK/Venice, Rome/JFK. Maybe you'll be lucky and get non-stops, but a stopover in a place like London Heathrow, Frankfort or Munich isn't all bad either. Just allow at least a couple hours for the connection, and preferably stay with the same airline for both legs.

What we did was we identified 2 or 3 favorite itineraries, saved them on Kayak, and watched the price on each for fluctuations. You don't have a heck of a lot of time, so if prices don't change very much over the next 2-3 weeks, I'd fire away because for May--the start of primo season--you probably aren't going to get a steal on the airfares.

While this is going on, identify your hotels or B&Bs in Venice, Florence & Rome, and grab them when you see a good one. And after you book the hotels, I would get on the Trenitalia website and book the Venice/Florence (2+ hours) and Florence/Rome (90 min) Frecciarossa (fast) trains. You'll save 50-60% on the fares, with the only caveat being you have to ride on that specific train at that specific time.

Enjoy your planning!

3000 per person without flight? That is way more than enough to do this trip yourself!

The first thing you want to do is lay out your days (I.e. Arrive Monday, stay in Venice 3 nights, train to Florence Thursday morning, etc). Then book flights (adjusting days if you want because sometimes it is cheaper to fly one day vs another). Buy your flights.

Then hotels.

My suggestions - get a guidebook or three (library or buy, make sure it is fairly current) and book a hotel in each city online. The guidebook will suggest hotels, as will places like booking.com and trip advisor. You want to stay central to the sites in the city - Rick Steves guidebooks explain the areas well, and from there its choosing based on your preferences.

The hotel website or booking.com will work to actually book. Some hotels may not be online, but lots are and you can easily only choose hotels with good web presence to make booking easier. Its just like booking a hotel in the US if you do it online. Enter dates, choose room, enter credit card, get confirmation email, done.

With 3 adults you will need a family room or a triple - it's not like hotels in the US where 2 double beds is standard. It needs to say triple. You could instead do 2 rooms at a cheaper hotel - more privacy. That's up to you.

After hotels are set your need to arrange trains between cities. This is a very common route and there are fast trains frequently between all these cities. Often 5 or more per day. You book these online, booking 3 months ahead of time gets you the cheapest fares but trains can be booked last minute if needed. We can help with how to do this once you're ready.

Then you are done with the essentials. You can book day tours or advance tickets to museums as needed. Rick Steves book is great for this kind of info.

I just took a quick look at fares NY - Venice, Rome - NY, and it appears you might save a good bit of money by taking a one-stop flight to Venice on Thursday, May 18, as opposed to Friday, May 19. Similarly, it looks as if it will be easier to find a good fare if you return on Tuesday, May 30, rather than Monday, May 29, so do fiddle around with alternative dates if you have some flexibility. There are a few non-stops into Venice, but they tend to cost substantially more. You may consider that worth it, because overnight flights are very exhausting for most of us.

Since this is a multi-city (open-jaw) itinerary, you may find wildly different pricing on the return leg, depending on which out-bound option you choose. I found it worthwhile to click on every reasonably attractive flight to my European destination to see whether there were decent returns available. Don't just assume you're home free if you find an $800 price with a nice flight to Venice; check to be sure you wouldn't be stuck with a 20-hour connection on the way back!

I made a list of the best flight possibilities (airline, flight number, times) and the price every day while I was shopping.

The conventional wisdom is that Paris CDG and London LHR are not the easiest airports for making connections, so you may prefer other options like Munich, Amsterdam or Dublin when prices are comparable. Some airports need more transfer time than others. You will not see a flight option that violates the minimum-time requirement, but you probably don't want to have just the minimum time to change planes. What if the first flight is late? You can get some information by Googling "connection time XXX", where "XXX" is the airport code.

If you narrow done your flight search to a few options, you can come back here and ask what people think.

Thanks everyone for all your great advice! Now to get busy! Ok looking at flights to Venice, is their an airline to stay away from? I am trying to stay with the same airline for both legs. Aeroflot and Aer Lingus are some of my choices

Don't go by me, but I'm partial to Lufthansa. But be careful when it says 'Lufthansa (operated by United)'. Stay away from that. I think--unless you have miles to use--United is horrendous for overseas flights. Not a big fan of Alitalia either.

I am strongly biased against Aeroflot. Perhaps irrationally so, but I'm not sure its safety procedures are quite up to the standards of US and western European airlines. It's one thing to be in a cramped seat and be served mediocre food; safety concerns are a whole 'nother thing.

I could wait until you start yr thread exploring train travel, but know that we did Florence , varenna & venice for an average daily cost of 100 euro a head, including trains, housing, food & admissions to museums

I just did the same trip with 3 people last October. We mostly stayed in Airbnb's. This one in Venice is great and close to Alilaguna bus stop (2 bridges) and the Vaporetto stop is right at the same spot - https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/3043430
The owner has 2 apartments in the same building so if that one isn't available the other one might be. Booking the trains are easy. Good luck and Happy Travels.

Another approach is to list all the sights you want to see and note what day(s) they are closed or have extended hours, so that you can make your plans so you don't miss the one most important thing. (I shuffled days to be in Nice when the Chagall museum was open.)

Not too late to book hotels, trains, planes -- you may not get the exact one(s) you first selected, but there are LOTS of hotels that are good enough to give you a great trip.

This would be a terrific trip, whether on your own, or with a Rick Steves Tour. I have done both. Doing it on your own will involve considerable planning time, related to lodging research and booking, train schedules, advance booking of popular sites, where to get good meals, etc. Plus you will be by yourselves, unless you make friends along the way, or book (and pay for) group tours for particular cities, sites or experiences. Those are various things that a Rick Steves Tour (or some other company) knowledgeably plans and pays for as part of a tour. RS guides are consistently excellent! As are the fellow RS travelers. When planning my own trips to Italy and other countries, I always try to be sure that I include one or more nights in small towns, not only big tourist-oriented cities. The experience is very different. That can be when traveling on my own, or before, as part of, or after a tour. Whatever you do, May is a wonderful, very popular and fast-approaching time to visit Italy. Other people are booking the best lodging as we chat, so I would advise that you do not procrastinate. Enjoy!
PS: I see that Delta has a direct, non-stop overnight flight from JFK to Venice, and American Air has a similar flight from Philadelphia to Venice.

Just to make sure - do not book two separate flights. Book both flights on a single ticket ("open-jaw") by choosing the "multiple destination" instead of round-trip or one-way.

Allow enough days in Venice. You'll probably be zonked by the time you get to your hotel (jetlag, little sleep on the plane, slow travel in Venice from the airport).

Has anyone stayed at the River Palace Hotel in Rome? If so how was the location to seeing sites in the center of the city like Pantheon?

I have not stayed at that hotel. It looks nice, the location is ok. It is farther from the center than I prefer but by no means unreasonable. It is about a mile from the Pantheon, closer to the Spanish steps. There are bus stops and a metro nearby.
Someone who knows the specific area better can give specifics.

You can plug hotel addresses into google maps for bus and walking directions to see how far things are from each other - I find this helpful

Re: the hotel you're considering in Rome
You can get a handle on hotels by looking them up on Tripadvisor and cross-checking on booking.com. I always do that. You'll only get a few responses here. On those sites, you may see hundreds of evaluations. Don't just look at numbers. Read some of the specific complaints. Quite often, those need to be taken with a grain (or maybe a shakerful) of salt. 1 person in a hundred complains of bedbugs? Probably phony. Sometimes it becomes clear that a dispute over money leads a person to heap on all sorts of other negatives. BTW, only people who have actually stayed at the booking.com places are able to rate them. Not so with TA.

The hotel is near lots of transportation options, you can be at the Pantheon by bus in less than ten minutes.

I agree that as you start to book your accommodations and activities, you'll find you've over-budgeted. My husband and I are traveling to Italy in June with a group of friends (10 of us in all), staying 11 nights, and not including air, our costs so far are just under $1,300 per person. That includes a 2 night hotel stay near the Pantheon in Rome, 1 night B&B stay near the Duomo in Florence, 1 night hotel stay in Orvieto, 7 night agriturismo stay in Tuscany with many included activities (cooking class, some tours), rental cars for 8 days, a private guided tour of Orvieto, a private guided tour of the Colosseum and Forum in Rome, the Pristine Sistine tour of the Vatican (Walks of Italy), a private guided full-day Clay Hills tour in Tuscany. Private tours are more affordable for our group than yours, as we have many people to divide the fee. We got non-stop round trip air for just $871 by vigilantly checking daily until we saw a good sale. Most of our bookings in Italy are reservations that didn't have any deposit requirements, and the prices are in Euro. $1,300 per person is at today's exchange rate, but if the Euro keeps going down as I've heard it may, we'll come out even better. My other comment is that even though you can save a lot of money traveling independently, Rick Steves tours are fabulous and if you splurge on one, you will never regret it! It would be a completely different style of travel. Sign up and leave all the planning to them! You'll see and learn so much and it will all be so effortless. And you'll make 25 or so new friends in the process. We've done two Rick Steves tours, with all our other travels in Europe being independent. I didn't come home from either of those tours saying "well, that was nice but we could have done it ourselves so much more cheaply." Instead, I've counted myself lucky at having such an over-the-top experience.