La Dolce Vita

May 31, 2007 4:45 AM

I am planning a trip to Italy for early August. What are some services that will make booking and going on the trip go smoothly?

I'd like to make this trip fun and priced well. We are adamant on going to the Vatican. Where can I find fair priced vacation packages online? Or, where should I go for airfare, hotel and car rental? We'd like the trip to last about 8 or 9 days.

Also, we're thinking of starting in Naples and driving to Rome. Good or bad idea?
Any advice is appreciated.

posted by time to put your air goggles on! to travel & transportation (7 comments total)

Renting car: I'd say no.

• You might find yourself stressed by the highly offensive (as opposed to defensive) Italian driving style
• difficulties and cost of trying to find parking in the cities
• consider the costs of tolls on the autostrada as well as gas prices
• Naples I'm not sure of, but here in Rome there are certain days when all traffic inside the GRA is blocked or only cars with odd/even license plates are allowed to circulate
• and the major biggy is the timing of your trip. August is when everyone goes on holidays and you might find yourself stuck in unmoving holiday traffic for a good few hours

I'd train it from Naples - faster, cheaper and way less stress in general.

You might want to list things you want to see/do and double check if opening times are altered fro that period. Many shops & restaurants close during August.

As far as finding vacation packages, you don't mention your budget or preferred style of travelling. Budget or lux? Fully planned out tours in a group or see the sights on your own time frame?
posted by romakimmy at 5:34 AM on May 31, 2007

Romakimmy has some good points. I would emphasize that you may want to rethink your travel dates. Italy shuts down in August. And it is hot.
posted by chillmost at 6:06 AM on May 31, 2007

It's a cliche, but those Italian trains really do run on time. (Whatever Snopes says.) It's a great rail network, and cheap (although admittedly here in the UK we are acclimatised to train journeys costing more than a bucket of diamonds.)
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 6:12 AM on May 31, 2007

Just to second everything here. Take the train, without any doubt. And don't do it in August if possible, as yes, the entire country is shut. (I live in Florence, and despite being a completely tourist town, it too is shut in August. And I mean shut.) And Naples in August will be *bloody*hot*.
posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName at 6:46 AM on May 31, 2007

Just returned from Italy. I loved using the trains for cities, but there may have been side trips I missed due to not having a car. I spent additional time in the mountains with friends who had a house, and a car was quite useful there.

I took my teenage son. We have unlocked quad-band cell phones, so we got Italian SIM cards, and were able to text each other. This was excellent when I wanted to stay in a museum, and he wanted to explore something else. Vodaphone Sim card was 10 euro, 5 of which was phone credit. They don't do the minutes thing; you have credit in the account, and use it as you go.
posted by theora55 at 9:17 AM on May 31, 2007

Have you thought about organizing the whole thing yourself? I haven't seen many vacation packages that come without the whole organized bus tour thing, and this way you'd get more control over where you'd be staying and what you'd be doing when.

It'd actually be pretty easy - hit up, say, Travelocity or Expedia to look for airfare/hotel packages, check out TripAdvisor's hotel/b&b/"other lodging" listings (which are ranked, user-submitted, current, and brutally honest - here's the Rome B&B page as an example) and then book. Train tickets are criminally easy to obtain, complete with e-mail confirmation and print-at-home-or-at-the-station tickets, through the Italian national rail system, Trenitalia. As a datapoint - I just looked up a second-class one-way ticket from Naples to Rome, and it came out to about 25 euros, on the fastest train (less than two hours) in the middle of the day.

If you're looking to save a little (or a lot) of money, consider flying to a cheaper European destination and then taking a budget airline from that point to Naples. (You can see all the airlines which fly to Naples and Rome if you look at Wikipedia's pages for their airports; remember that Rome has two airports.) Furthermore, you might want to check out a dead-tree guidebook at your library to make sure you're not skipping any cool smaller places to stay (as the big websites seem to enjoy booking people in $300/night places); even if they've only got a phone number or e-mail listed, most hotel proprietors speak at least a little English (and you can learn a little Italian, right?) and with SkypeOut, you won't be out that much money to investigate.

Lastly, I took a walking tour with this company, booked a day in advance by walking into their office while I was in Rome, and it was great.
posted by mdonley at 1:06 PM on May 31, 2007

We had reservations at the Uffizzi and the Academia dell'Arte in Florence, so we didn't have to wait in line. We paid for them at our hotel, but you might be able to make reservations online; we met someone who made free reservations online.

We got a package deal that covered flights, hotels & some trains. Try Go-today.com, Gate1, Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, etc. Travel packagers book blocks of seats on flights, and rooms in hotels, so they get a good rate. I had limited time to find and book hotels. Our hotel in Rome was quite good value. The one in Florence was higher rated, but not as nice. My priority for hotels was location, and we really enjoyed being able to walk everywhere in these 2 great cities.

The Alitalia plane was grubby, but the food and wine was pretty good. The airline is being sold, I think.

email's in my profile.
posted by theora55 at 4:45 PM on May 31, 2007