Creating Europe Backpacking Itineraries
Continuing my planning of my Budget Backpacking Europe Quest, I have gone through the rigors of making potential ‘big picture’ itineraries for my trip. Basically, I’ve just done a lot of research and found a lot of raw data regarding prices of traveling to and from specific destinations.
When creating a budget backpacking itinerary through Europe, here is a rough outline of what to do:
- Find cheapest flights from arrival / departure points.
- Find cheapest flights between destinations within your Europe itinerary
- Find Eurail/Bus pass prices
- Put it all together, into sample “What If” travel itineraries that you would enjoy using.
Really, it’s not too difficult. I came up with thirteen viable Eurotrip travel itineraries, which are, for the most part, all appeasing to my dreams. I made my sample what if travel itineraries in an Excel spreadsheet, as it is the efficient way to compute prices. Simple knowledge of Excel forumulas goes a long way in making itineraries, so I highly suggest acquiring these skills if you do not already have them.
My entire spreadsheet as of right now can be viewed online here. It is not formatted very pretty, but it gets the job done, and you get the overall idea that I’m trying to show you.
Basically you can tell that my main destinations include a combination of the following:
- Vienna
- Bratislava (it’s so close to Vienna, so why not?)
- Berlin
- Munich
As was expected, flying throughout Europe is a fair amount cheaper than taking the rail, which is very unfortunate. Since I want to have the full backpacking experience, I’ll probably choose an itinerary that includes some sort of rail travel.
So now let’s all hope that the US Dollar doesn’t fall any farther by next summer…
Have you looked into open Jaw Tickets? That way you can fly into one city and fly out of another.
Have you considered that most European Airlines such as EasyJet fly out of small airports outside the city, it might cost you extra to get to Airport and time spent at airports(Check-in, Delays)
The cheaper city to fly into is Frankfurt or Amsterdam from US.
Great tips, gives alot of helpful insight into an otherwise trying experience.
Have you looked at the Eurail passes, specifically the Select Passes? You can get a 2nd-class youth pass for 8 days of rail travel in 2 months in 3 adjoining countries for only US$389. You could do Benelux (The Netherlands, Belgium, & Luxembourg), Austria and Germany, then buy a plane ticket to Barcelona.