Best cities to fly in/out of?

Hi Demian, I'd use a search engine like www.kayak.com and set daily price alerts for Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich, and Milan for example. Then, follow them to see the trends. It's just a guess, but Milan might come in less expensive - it's difficult to say for certain. Summer travel is typically more expensive than any other time of the year. It's probably going to be more cost effective to fly "open jaw" (into one city and home from another) even though a round trip ticket into and out of the same city might cost less, you have to factor in the cost of backtracking to return to the city you started from. For your itinerary, you might fly into Milan for NW Italy, train to SE France, travel through the French Alps and make your way to Paris, then home from Amsterdam.

Fly into one city and out of another. Try to avoid backtracking by moving in a circular direction. Given the cities you listed, Amsterdam is the farthest NW and Italy is the farthest SE. Thus one logical solution would be to fly into Amsterdam, then Paris to Alps to N Italy to SE France, flying home out of Nice. You could of course, reverse the order just as easily, flying into Nice/home from AMS. There is no super-cheap hidden city that will be a bargain compared to all others. Airlines use massive computer firepower to maximize revenue, and literally change fares at times minute by minute. Just do your research, get a good idea of ballpark costs, and when you get somewhat closer in time and see a good fare, jump on it. The relevant gateways for you are Paris, Amsterdam, Nice, Brussels, Frankfurt, Zurich, Geneva, Milan and perhaps a few others. Keep using the web to check and compare fares.

Fly into Amsterdam, fly out of Milan.

Sometimes Pisa is a cost effective city to fly in/out of. Train connections from there are very easy. We always fly open jaw to minimize back-tracking. When we plan our trips we first book our plane tickets over and back based on the best fare we can find using the methods mentioned previously. Then we plan our itinerary based on the 2 cities we are flying to/from. If you are set on specific countries to start and end at this system may not work as well for you. We are usually pretty flexible on our itinerary in the first stages of planning a trip because anyplace you can go in Europe offers interesting travel opportunities.