HI: I'm booked for the Best of Adriatic Tour beginning May 4 in Ljubljana. My friend and I will fly in a few days early to get acclimated. My question is: We begin the tour in Ljubljana but end in Dubrovnik. Regarding air flight reservations. What is the best way to book this? Buy two one-way flights? Buy a round trip ticket and an additional one way flight from Dubrovnik back to Ljublijana and then fly home? I'm new at this. Please help.
Thank you.
It seems to me, but then maybe I’m missing something, two one way tickets would be a lot more expensive than a round trip flying into Ljubljana and out of Dubrovnik.
What OP should be looking at is 'multi-city' ( aka 'open jaw') to at least to explore their options.
Two one way tickets is likely to be horribly and unnecessarily expensive. That should be the LAST option.
I went on this tour last year and really enjoyed it! I’ll add the link to my trip report, so you can see what I did when I arrived early. Definitely recommend that cave tour!
To get there, you want to do a search on multi-city flights which means you come home from a different destination than you flew to originally. I was coming from the Spokane area, so was a bit harder to get there.
Maybe I should add this since you mentioned you’re new to this. This applies if you decide to purchase a route where you have two airline companies who aren’t associated with each other to reach Ljubljana. If your first flight is late and you miss the next flight, your second airline will not honor your ticket. For example:
Delta, KLM, Air France are partners - KLM will rebook a missed flight due to their partner if it’s all on one reservation.
Delta & Easy Jet are not partners. Your tickets would be two separate reservations, so you would need to buy a new Easy Jet ticket, if your Delta connection arrived late.
I happened to spend a few weeks in England (flew there on Delta) before flying to Ljubljana with Easy Jet. And when I flew from Dubrovnik to Amsterdam on Easy Jet, I stayed overnight near Amsterdam (at Leiden) before flying back home on my Delta ticket. That overnight was to prevent the chance of needing to buy a new ticket to go from Amsterdam to Spokane.
There have been a number of posts about flights to and from the Adriatic tour, it's not the easiest location. It would help to know your starting point/airport.
Here's a fairly recent post with some ideas.
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/croatia/adriatic-tour-6ba6efd2-39bd-4cb8-af7e-8e9309f9eff1
When I took this tour, I flew into Ljubljana. I took a short flight from Dubrovnik to Rome which set me up for much better connections home.
I just booked flights for this tour for September next year. I’m using miles so I actually did book one way tickets, out on United and return on American.
United:: San Francisco to Frankfurt
Frankfurt to Graz, Austria (United use Lufthansa).
Spend 3 nights exploring Graz and recover from jet lag!
Graz to Lubinana via direct train from Graz.
After tour ends.
Dubrovnik to London Heathrow
London to San Francisco
And yes it was a challenge getting it all figured but somehow I did ! Good luck.
frister,
It would help to have more information on the specifics of your trip. For example, are you just taking the Adriatic tour and then heading straight home? Also, when you say that you're "new at this", does that mean you haven't been to Europe before? Also, where are is "home"?
I would not buy two one-way tickets as that will likely be more expensive than buying return or open-jaw tickets. You might consider consulting a travel agent to help with that, and you could ask about trip cancellation or other insurance at the same time.
When I took that tour, I travelled to Ljubljana via train from Munich (I had already been to several other places in Europe prior to Munich). At the end of the tour, I booked a flight from Dubrovnik to Zürich, and then continued by train down into Italy. As Dubrovnik doesn't have rail connections, that was the easiest and quickest solution.
As others have said, definitely explore ‘multi city’ options with the airlines. I like to start with google flights to see what potential options are, then book directly with the airline.
I wasn’t on the Adriatic Tour, but last summer we took the Best of Eastern Europe tour, which ended in Bled, and the closest airport was Ljubljana. We had difficulty finding reasonable flights home from Ljubljana-international options were limited with many and long connections. We ended up flying home from Venice instead which had great options to our home airport. It was about a three hour drive and we booked a whittle service called Go Opti. So if the flights to Ljubljana aren’t convenient, it might be something to consider.
