Summer 2014 - Italy and Switzerland

July and August being the hottest months in Bahrain (with temperatures soaring even up to 48 deg Celsius) we wanted to escape to someplace cooler. And what could have been a better location than our dream destination 'Switzerland'.
However, we wanted to visit another country with Switzerland and after a lot of deliberation, we decided to go with Italy.

So there we were with the dates and with the destinations finalized – Italy and Switzerland for 15 days (18th July -2nd August 2014)

We decided to plan the entire trip on our own, right from the bookings, to the internal travels, food, sight-seeing....basically everything. It was our first experience of doing it by ourselves. So we came up with a to-do list.
1. Book the flight tickets
2. Book the hotels.
3. Book the internal travel tickets.
4. Shortlist the places to visit.
5. Plan a detailed Itinerary.
6. And most importantly, plan how to manage 15 days of travel with a toddler

The part which required the quickest action on our parts was the booking of the flight tickets as the flight rates were increasing very fast. We immediately booked our tickets via Expedia.

Next, we had to book the hotels. The most important factor that we were considering while doing the hotel bookings was the location of the hotel. We wanted something centrally located to reduce the travel time between the sites we wanted to visit and the hotel. After a lot of blunders and confusions, we finished all our hotel bookings. There are a few pointers which I gathered from our experience that I would like to note down here:
- Do not panic when the hotel booking websites start showing the hotels which you like as fully booked for your date. Contact the hotel directly through their website. Rooms are often available.
- Compare everywhere, but book directly with the hotel. They give you the best rates, sometimes even a discount for cash payment. All our hotels in Italy gave us a 10% discount for cash payment.
- On some hotel booking websites (like booking.com), they have a refundable room rate which is a bit more than the non-refundable one. Always go for the refundable ones, you have much more flexibility to change your plan or your hotel later.
- There are some very good hotel review websites like Tripadvisor. Read up the reviews on these websites and select something which meets your requirements.

Next, we booked the internal travel tickets. For travelling between cities in Italy, we decided to book train tickets and did the bookings through www.italiarail.com or www.trenitalia.com. However, we got to know later that TrenItalia is the train operator whereas Italiarail is an agency that sells TrenItalia tickets. Hence, tickets are cheaper on www.trenitalia.com. Also, if you are 100% sure of your travel dates and timings, it helps to do advance bookings as the prices are significantly lesser.
For internal travel in Switzerland, after a lot of research we decided to go for the 8 day swiss pass. You will need to decide which is the best swiss pass for you based on the number of days you will be in Switzerland and what all you plan to cover. (http://www.swiss-pass.ch/). They have a variety of passes like Flexipass, SaverPass etc.

I will post my itinerary and trip experiences in my upcoming posts. Stay on!