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New Travel Plans Taking Shape...Slowly

artnbarb

1000+ Posts
After our transatlantic cruise from Florida to England was cancelled I had to completely rethink our plans for next summer. I'm updating here because our travels involve multiple countries, I'll be posting questions about each leg on the appropriate board as the time comes. @Pauline has already been a huge help, and spending time with her and Steve in Switzerland helped her to better understand what kind of travelers we are. We're not really hikers, we're walkers, and we're also sightseers. Our new plan, while still not definite, is starting to take shape.

* Use FF miles to fly from the states to Dublin. I may have to pay for a domestic flight to Philly, then use miles for a direct flight to Dublin. Right now all AA is giving me are flights stopping in London, and that just seems pointless.

* We plan to be in Ireland for about 17 days. We'll start and end in Dublin, roughly following Rick Steves' itinerary, with adjustments from SE input and what we discover in our friends' new guidebook for Ireland: "Ireland: Small-town Itineraries for the Foodie Traveler"

* From Dublin we'll fly to Leeds, England, then drive to a vacation rental in Thirsk, Yorkshire. We'll pick up our rental car at the airport and return it to our departure airport when we leave England. When we had to re-think our plans, Yorkshire was the one place I really, really wanted to include. So now we are! Two weeks here, midway between the moors and the dales, near York, and within driving distance of the coast. AND the cottage comes with a cat!

* Two weeks in Rottingdean, Sussex is next. I only hope two weeks is enough! After this we'll fly out of Gatwick or Heathrow to (most likely) Salzburg.

* We want to rent an apartment in Austria for a week, and plan to do lots of walking. @Kathy suggested St Gilgen, and for a variety of reasons, that seems the most likely. I really wanted to go back to the Saafelden area where we did Hiking Without Luggage over 20 years ago, but St Gilgen and the Salzburg airport might work out better. We may also spend a few nights in Salzburg, or extend our rental beyond a week, if that's possible. We'll rent and return a car at the Salzburg airport. (An alternative is flying into/out of Munich - served by more airlines)

* After Austria we wanted to spend a few days with our friends in Switzerland, near Lucerne, but at this point I can't figure out a logical, not-too-expensive way to do that, so we'll probably just fly from Salzburg to Rome. I'm not finding great flight options out of Salzburg, so although the Innsbruck airport is small, I need to see what they offer. We could also fly to Milan and pick up a car there. Peugeot usually waives the one-way charge if you book early - I'm hoping they have the same offer for 2018. If we fly to Rome then we have to drive 2 hours back to Umbria, and if we pick up the car in Milan we have a 4 hour drive, but hopefully a shorter flight. I guess the cost of the flights, and if it's a direct flight will make the final decision.

* After that we'll be in Italy for just over 2 months. We have to time everything so that we're not in Schengen countries for more than 90 days. Most countries in Europe are Schengen, but England and Ireland are not.

I'm trying now to get an idea of various costs, but it's hard because it's so far out. Many places don't have their 2018 prices yet, but I can get a rough idea based on 2017 prices. The car rental prices seem to be the craziest - very high right now, and I have no way of knowing if they'll drop. At least with AutoEurope I can keep checking the prices and they'll refund the difference if the price drops. For this year I found a better price on our car through Kemwell, and AE matched it.

That's it for now. Still talking about our options, and still open to changes. Sometimes I get so excited about planning that I just want to book everything, but after so many false starts I'm trying to slow myself down.
 
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Sounds like a great trip!!

Have you thought about taking the train from Salzburg to Lucerne? I found fares for 39.90 euros. I just plugged in a date, so your date could cost a more. You could then fly from Zurich to Italy.
 
Let me know where you're staying in Dublin / what appeals, and I'll try to pop a few suggestions in.
 
* Use FF miles to fly from the states to Dublin. I may have to pay for a domestic flight to Philly, then use miles for a direct flight to Dublin. Right now all AA is giving me are flights stopping in London, and that just seems pointless.

I had the same problem with AA, trying to use FF miles for business class tickets and gave up and bought a ticket -- Using Google Flight alert, I found that British Airways offered the preferred itinerary for $610 less than on American Airlines, so I booked that ticket for May. I posted about it on this forum.
 
From what I see, if from Austria your final destination is Umbria, flying to Rome and backtracking doesn't really save time over taking ground transportation all the way. You can fiddle with www.rome2rio.com to see buses in addition to trains. If you want to get a car without cross-border one-way charges, you might go by train or bus to Bolzano or Verona to get the car.
 
Sounds like a great trip!!

Have you thought about taking the train from Salzburg to Lucerne? I found fares for 39.90 euros. I just plugged in a date, so your date could cost a more. You could then fly from Zurich to Italy.
We could, and I'll certainly consider that option, thanks for the idea! Right now I'm juggling so many balls in the air, and when I change one part of the trip everything else is affected. IF we could find a flight from England to Salzburg (right time, right luggage charges!), and IF our friends will be available in Switzerland, then this would be a great plan! We could rent/return the car in Salzburg, train to Lucerne (just 15 minutes from our friends) then have them take us to Zurich for a flight to Italy. Still tweaking!
 
Let me know where you're staying in Dublin / what appeals, and I'll try to pop a few suggestions in.
Thanks @Ian Sutton . I'm using RS recommendations for most of our accommodations in Ireland, but haven't really looked at anything yet. We plan to fly into Dublin and take a few extra days to get over jet lag, see Dublin, and take any day trips from Dublin. After that we'll rent a car and head out to see the country. If you have any recommendations for Dublin - easy to reach from the airport via public transport, centrally located - I'm happy to hear them!
 
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From what I see, if from Austria your final destination is Umbria, flying to Rome and backtracking doesn't really save time over taking ground transportation all the way. You can fiddle with www.rome2rio.com to see buses in addition to trains. If you want to get a car without cross-border one-way charges, you might go by train or bus to Bolzano or Verona to get the car.
We'll probably do a buy-back car like this year, because our rental will be for 2+ months, so our pick-up options are limited to Malpensa or FCO. Art prefers a 2 hour drive from FCO vs a 5 hour drive from Milan.

Again, there are just too many balls in the air right now. IF we go to Switzerland we could fly Zurich-Rome, or take the train from Zurich to Milan. EDIT: the train from Zurich to Milan takes 4 hours, then we still have a 5 hour drive to Umbria, so I think this option in OUT! It seems like every leg of our trip has so many possibilities, and it's challenging to consider all the pluses and minuses of each one!
 
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Ok, for picnic / fancy foods, Fallon & Byrne (Exchequer st) is a wonderful food hall. Not especially cheap, but rarely a rip-off for top quality / hard to find stuff, including a wonderful range of exotic / wild mushrooms, great cheese selection, bacon jam (!), etc. etc. one of the great food halls. In addition, their wine bar downstairs is a cosy escape from the city, serving light bites and good wine by the glass, plus well stocked shelves of wine

Just a little further down the road (turn left coming out of Fallon & Byrne), there is a decent ice-cream shop on the opposite side of the road.

If you feel obliged to go to Temple Bar area (it is touristy), the one place I'd recommend is Elephant & Castle, which surprisingly by the name isn't a pub, but rather a modest, but always busy restaurant, with the chicken wings in vinegar the house speciality, indeed the reason to go there.

Plenty of bars with live music, but sundays seem a good time to go. Although it is a little touristy, and is a little way up the river, the Brazen Head (reputed to be the oldest pub in Ireland) does what it does well, and very much encourages all to sing along. Good musicians on the day we went, and an uplifting vibe.

Nice little shopping arcade off Georges St, very mixed, but we did like the glass shop with all sorts of characterful designs.

My favourite restaurants were all out (30 mins walk from the centre) near the Camden Court Hotel (Camden St). All the ones below are in that area:

Green19 for a modern Irish Bistro style, a little closely packed, but very good food / Irish beers / etc. and I liked the honest round number pricing

Camden Kitchen, a cosy bistro with food straddling French and Spanish influences. As with many places in Dublin, an early evening specials board offered very good value

Morton's for made to order doorstop sandwiches plus plenty of other stuff. Incredibly filling. On Fridays there is a 'Farmers market' which was really just street food, however the Paella stall was very good indeed.

Seagrass - became my favourite, partly through a limited menu of great food, fairly priced, but also through free corkage which had extended to every night except Saturday when I was there regularly.

Il Primo sadly closed, an Italian bistro/restaurant that would have succeeded in Italy, yet was also brave enough to do things a little different. A huge loss to the city

Neon. Thai street food style, ideal if you want an easy-going meal, of great value, with a communal feel. Once shown to a table or seats at the huge communal table, go up to the counter to order food & drink (including handy small carafes of wine). The food is then brought out in cardboard cartons, though IIRC they can supply plates on request. Included in the price is a help yourself 'Mr Whippy' style ice-cream, and it's fun to have a go at swirling your own.

There are fancier restaurants, and indeed simpler / chain restaurants, plus many pubs doing decent food (my favourite of these was Against the Grain, also out towards Camden St, which is a real ale destination, yet the food could sometimes be surprisingly good, mostly of the 'filling / hearty' style.

Aside from that, Parnell St houses a couple of historic department stores
 
I'VE PUT OUR FLIGHT TO DUBLIN ON HOLD! I'm still hesitating to make the final decision, but I don't know why! I wanted to use FF miles, because we're not flying that much and I don't want to lose the miles. The basic 30K miles for one-way to Europe made us fly into London and change planes, which I do NOT want to do - if I have any chance of falling asleep I don't want to have to wake up earlier to change planes! So what I have on hold cost 65K miles, - 35K miles to avoid changing in London - am I crazy???

I even looked at booking directly from PHL, but that didn't work either - at the 30K mile level they STILL make you go thru London! I had thought we could book a cheap flight to DC to visit our granddaughters, then just drive to Philly, but no such luck.

What I have on hold is Tampa - Philly- Dublin, arriving at 8:45 am. We only have an hour in Philly between planes which makes me nervous, but the alternative is sitting in the airport all day - if we were flying Business Class at least we would have a comfortable lounge.

I also paid (or will pay) $129/pp for seats with 6" of extra legroom - but the seats aren't any wider than the 'regular' seats, so I'm also waffling about that. It's a 7 hour flight, not the usual 9 hour flight we used to take to Rome, but I'm just not sure 6" of legroom is worth $129. Maybe for Art, he's almost 6', but I'm only 5'1".

OK, going to bed now. I may have just talked myself out of the $129 extra surcharge, and now i'm even reconsidering the London stop - as long as we don't have to change airports! some of the flights land in Gatwick and leave from Heathrow, or vise-versa, which seems absolutely crazy to me. I'll sleep on it and look at everything again in the morning.

I have until Sept 4th to pay/cancel, so let me know your thoughts!
 
Always right to sleep on it, and I'm sure you'll know the best answer in the morning.
 
It looks like the 65K is the AAnytime award, which may or may not make the last seat on the plane available but it's close to it. I pretty much wouldn't consider such a booking in any case, but I think the same award would be available within a month, if not a week, of the trip, and you can keep monitoring availability for the 30K SAAver award. I'll also assume that you've checked availability on alternate dates within your range of flexibility.

I've learned a lot about AA awards on the FlyerTalk board, one thing being that SAAver awards can be changed at no charge if the trip is between the same start and end points and availability opens up on preferable flights. I'm not sure if, if you book the AAnytime and the SAAver becomes available, you can change the booking and have the extra miles credited back. If you aren't on FlyerTalk, you could join and ask about it on the AA board's Newbie Lounge thread.

From https://www.aa.com/i18n/aadvantage-program/miles/redeem/award-travel/award-travel.jsp#reinstating , I see at minimum, for cancelling an award booking:

The reinstatement charge is $150 per account for the first award ticket. Additional award tickets reinstated to the same account at the same time will have a $25 charge per ticket
So you could for that fee get the AAnytime booking cancelled, miles reinstated, and use fewer miles for the SAAver, but from what I see, there's no point in making an AAnytime booking months in advance.

When I flew last year, Main Cabin Extra couldn't be had for a fee on a SAAver booking; I don't know if that's changed.

The bad news about your having it on hold is that I just saw this on the AA site:

For travel ticketed in booking code Y on or after August 30, 2017, you'll no longer get complimentary Main Cabin Extra or Preferred seats. This includes AAnytime awards booked in Main Cabin.
 
Ok, thanks, esp @Andrew for all the detailed info. I'm going to cancel this ticket - my miles are too precious to spend double needlessly. We're making our stay in Dublin 2 weeks +3 day, and the main reason for the additional 3 days is to allow us time to adjust to the time change, so I've decided that as long as we use the same airport in London, and still arrive in Dublin before noon, it's fine.

As you all know, I need time to absorb all my choices, to write them down, talk them over, then eventually make a decision. this is just my process, thanks for bearing with me!

I may go back to my idea of combining a visit with our grandgirls in DC to this trip. We could get a decent airfare on SWA from Tampa to DCA, visit the girls, then drop the car off at Dulles and fly Dulles - LH.R - DUB for 30K miles, arriving in Dublin before 11 a.m. I can live with that. If for some reason the grandgirls are out of town, we can always fly directly into Dulles.
 
Good, another thing I wanted to make clear was that you could book the SAAver connection via London (but try to avoid BA on the transatlantic leg with its exorbitant fees), and change to the non-stop to Dublin at no charge. Your starting airport would need to be the same, and I'm not sure if you get fees refunded if they're lower.
 
Because it's so far out, and our plans may change, I'm just going to wait. We've changed our FF booking with no fees, and we've also had to pay the $150 + 75 fee. I have to fight my out-dated assumption that buying/booking earlier is better. It's not. And knowing that AA will change their FF offers many, many times over the next several months, I'm fairly confident that we can still get the flights we want.
 
It might be worthwhile to get an Expert Flyer subscription, for $10/month, to monitor when two SAAver awards become available on a non-stop to Dublin.
 

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