<p>@EPTR, I just found a Huffington Post article that from March 2014 that was talking about the best time to buy airline tickets and their lowest price. It said Europe would be 151 days prior to departure, so basically 5 months. We aren’t going until next September, but I plan on buying my WAY before that. I want to nail down my hotels and I know 5 months is out of my comfort zone.</p>
<p>I just checked for the dates that we might go to Italy (end of March), on Delta it’s about $1,550 to Rome. I can get an airmiles ticket for only 60K miles. 60K, that’s nothing. Of course, I just depleted our mileage bank, but we’ll build that up in the next month or two. REALLY worth it to get some of those credit cards that give huge mileage bonuses to sign up, if one is going to use credit cards anyways. Of course, Delta is a little flaky on the international airmiles booking. One minute it’s 60K miles, you check two minutes later, it’s 220K. So annoying, but if you keep checking and are flexible, you might eventually get a deal. I hope they worked those bugs out.</p>
<p>We just got back last night. Four of us had a wonderful 14 night trip. The cheapest airfare we found was into Milan on Delta. We hired a private driver to take us to Lake Como. That area was beautiful! For the rest of the trip, we used trains. We just showed up at each station and purchased our tickets. It was easy, and as mentioned earlier, train stations were all in the hearts of the cities, so we could usually walk to our hotels or take a short taxi or ferry ride. I would never drive in Italy. We noticed that there were no marked lanes on any roads. Also, on the way to Lake Como, the road narrowed to one lane and our driver had to use his horn before each curve in the road. We stayed in all 4* hotels, using tripadvisor reviews. We also hired tour guides recommended by tripadvisor for Venice, Florence, Rome, and the Vatican. We also visited the Cinque Terre by train, which was beautiful and easy. </p>
<p>We saw hundreds of tour groups and they all looked the same. You had a leader, holding up a sign or an umbrella, followed by 30 people wearing headsets to listen to the guide. </p>
<p>Glad to see these posts! We are going to Italy this April for 3.5 weeks. So far we have only booked a 10 day tour with Nada’s Italy. It is a small tour with no more than 12 people. There will be cooking classes and many small villages. I have been and lived in Italy so want a different experience this time.</p>
<p>As the trip is so very long from the West coast we will fly into JFK (staying in a hotel 1-2 nights) or into Boston (staying with our D in RI a few nights) to break the trip up. My research so far shows that it will not be any more or only a little more expensive that a long flight from home. Also this way we will do a direct from home to the East coast and a direct to Italy. 5 hours and 7 hours only. We did this last June when we traveled to Spain and it really helped with the jet lag.</p>
<p>So far our tentative itinerary is to fly in/out of Milan. First going to Lake Como and then to Venice, meet up with the tour in Bologna which ends in Rome the last night. D will fly from Boston to Rome and we will rent an apt. for a week in Florence, taking day trips. We will all fly out of Milan for our homes.</p>
<p>Toledo–how did you hire a driver and was it expensive?</p>
<p>This will be our first tour experience and I only considered really small ones–so we shall see if we like it. I am not a morning person and on this tour things begin berween 9-11 a.m. which makes me think it might work. </p>
<p>I would never consider returning to Italy without a tour group. It was glitchiest trip we’ve ever taken and the hardest place to negotiate and we’ve traveled all over the world. It would take hours, at the rate I type, to list every problem we encountered. We had just spent the week before in Morocco and it was smooth sailing everywhere, including driving a rental car. The whole rental car experience in Italy was a nightmare. To top it off, over a year later, we received in the mail two whopping tickets for moving violations. My H is a very good driver, but driving in and out of Florence and finding parking was nightmarish. The signage was incomprehensible and the multiple lane rotaries were crazy.</p>
<p>My sister rented a car in Europe about 30 years ago and she and her husband tried to drive into Florence. They had reservations at an inn there. When they got there and tried to navigate it, they turned around and just headed out of town!</p>