Planning Your Austrian Trip

Planning is relatively easy. You just have to decide where in Austria you want to visit. There are festivals galore in the summer including: The Salzburg Mozart Festival (impossible to get tickets), Innsbruck Music Festival and much more.

Air? Air is high in the summer but persist and perhaps you can find a reasonable fare buy using Airfarebasement.com, Economytravel.com or trying other airlines. We found tickets on United into Munich with a return on Lufthansa from Munich to London/Heathrow, then United from London to Chicago. It was $400/person less doing it that way than a non-stop flight. Worth it to us.

Hotels? Decided to stay at Hotel Zillertalerhof in Mayrhofen. If you go to the Mayrhofen website, you can request offers on line from the various hotels/apartments, etc. and that is how we selected Hotel Zillertalerhof****. It’s difficult to find comparably priced hotels in the United States that give you so much. A 4**** hotel ran us 100 Euros/day which included huge buffet breakfasts, a very big room, dinner that always included a starter, salad bar, soup, choice of three entrees and dessert AND all taxes and service (tips) were included! I don’t know about you, but a Days Inn usually runs about $60 a night for two persons, with all taxes and without food.

a small part of the breakfast buffet

Selected the Hotel Post in St. Johann di Tirol. This was a 3*** hotel in the center of St. Johann (more on hotel later). Accommodation all settled…on to working out the train schedules to get there from Munich.

Trains? Once again, I don’t know what I ever did without the Internet! You can either buy individual tickets through the German Railway, or buy passes through Rail Europe. It depends upon how much you are planning to rail through Europe. We only needed three days worth of travel which made it more economical to purchase single tickets on-line through the German Railways. Their site takes a credit card and delivered the tickets to the U.S. at no extra charge.

That was really the end of this planning…time to pack clothes, passports, ATM card (don’t leave without it), get on the plane and go…