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Itinerary - Help Connecting the Dots

Posted by on

I'm planning our vacation to Switzerland for March (14 nights). With me will be my husband, our 2 children (10 & 8), and my parents. We've all traveled in Europe together 3 times so far. We will be flying into and out of Zurich. I think I've identified the towns we would like to visit but now I'm trying to figure out what order to visit each to reduce long travel days. We are fine with car and/or train travel and will book what makes the most sense. I really want to see some of Austria so hoping it will make sense to fit it in. If you see anything you'd suggest I drop please feel free to mention it.

I was thinking we'd immediately hop on a train to leave Zurich and spend just one night there are the end of the trip.
Here's what I'm thinking for order right now:
Lauterbrunnen - 3 nights
Lucerne - 2 nights
Munich - 2 nights
Salzburg - 3 nights
Appenzell - 3 nights
Zurich - 1 night

Thank you in advance for any opinions and advice! This is the part of planning that is always most difficult for me

Posted by
643 posts

I will offer that heading into the mountains in March is still ski season, and
weather could be an issue. Traffic on the highways into the mountains
could be crowded on the weekends.

Other than that, I think the itinerary would work better if you flew into Munich
and departed via Zurich (or vice versa). You could go Munich-> Salzburg->
Appenzell->Lauterbrunnen->Lucerne->Zurich. Since it's only an hour from
Lucerne to Zurich Airport, if you really didn't want to spend any time in
Zurich, you could conceivably just go to the airport from Lucerne on the
morning of your flight.

Posted by
8 posts

Good point about the weather impacting travel in the mountains. Ski season would be wonderful if we can luck out on also good travel. Last March we were able to catch the end of ski season in Chamonix and it was a highlight of France for all of us.

We do already have our airfare, airfare for a family of 4 means I plan the vacation around the best airfare. So in and out of Zurich is what I need to work around.

I do like that idea of ending in Lucerne so we could simply take the train from there to the airport. I need to put some thought into how I could rework the order to make that happen.

Thank you for your advice

Posted by
1088 posts

Well if you pick the right train, you could be in central Munich directly from Zurich airport in 3.5 hours and start your trip there. Work your way back to Luzern and then catch a train directly to the airport your last day. Or, if you want to push this to its logical conclusion, take the train all the way to Salzburg (5 hrs 15 min) and work your way back from the most outlying point. It's pretty much a direct line back from Salzburg, so after a long first day it would be easy sailing the rest of your trip. (A bit of backtracking to Zurich, but Swiss Rail makes that easy.)

Posted by
643 posts

I realize that you may not want to reconsider parts of your trip that already are kind
of locked in, but an open jaw flight may not be any more expensive than a RT. It
might be worth checking what level of rebook/cancel options you have, as in addition
to the itinerary options, we are now getting into the time where winter transatlantic
airfares may be coming down.

As Nelly notes, you can simply train it to Munich (or Salzburg) to start your trip if
you want to realign the itinerary. I think Munich might be better, as you may
go through Munich to get to Salzburg anyways, but it's a non-trivial added cost
for 6 train tickets. Scheduling a train when coming off a (long) flight is always
tricky, and the topic of many posts in the forum as well.

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