[Idyllchat] Affording Italy, another perspective

[alan rudolph]

Well, for what it's worth, here's my two cents worth:)  4 friends and myself came back from Italy this past September....this time it was not through Untours.  We rented a spacious, beautiful 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom apt on the Amalfi coast for 10 days at the cost of $3300. Divided among the 5 of us, it came out to $660 apiece or $66 a day.....now how can you beat that???  We prepared breakfast and dinner and ate out for lunch almost everyday.  We did not have a car ( wouldn't drive that coast anyway!! ) but had access to buses right by our apt..  One bus went into Positano all day long at the cost of 1 euro.  If you were going further, you could buy a bus pass for 5 euro that lasted all day.  
   
  3 of us had enough frequent flyer miles to use which was great.  The other 2 had to pay $1100 each for their tickets.  Travel insurance came to about $50 each.  We do not eat in very fancy places....trattorias are fine for us.  The house wines are good, too.
   
  3 of us tacked 4 more days on at the end and flew up to Venice at the cost of $109 each for airfare on Alitalia.  We decided to fly because the train took 8 hours to get there and was about $65 versus a little over an hour and $45 more.  As you all know, Venice is very expensive but we found through Rick Steeves travel book a small hotel just behind St. Marcos Square for 90 euro a night for a triple ( breakfast included ).
   
  I, too, did not add up the entire trip but I know I spent less than $2000 ( keeping in mind my free airfare going over ).  Echoing what most everyone else is saying, traveling is such a wonderful and educational experience, I am willing to give up my daily Starbucks to be able to do it!!!!  Also going with 4 or 5 people helps tremendously to bring down the cost.
   
  Donna
  Michigan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.dca.net/pipermail/idyllchat/attachments/20071025/40ea07ce/attachment.htm