Notes
Trip Start
Apr 30, 2004
1
2
34
Trip End
May 09, 2004
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Miami Springs,
Florida,
United States
Friday, April 30, 2004
www.dogpile.com
All major world tourism destinations have web sites in English. In your search engine just put the name of the country, then look at the addresses and pick the official site. For example, typing "France" in Dogpile, the official French tourism site comes up in Dogpile as number 6. In Google it comes up as number 5.
Airline tickets are a maze. We stumbled on Air Gorilla www.airgorilla.com came up with the best fares, but in the end we relied on Priceline www.priceline.com, which is fine if you don't mind being told which airline and route you will be taking after you have paid for the ticket.
Hotel accommodations are the most complex of all. There are thousands of hotels in France, and virtually all of them seem to have web sites. Here's where a guide book or personal recommendation comes in handy. We booked the hotels in St. Remy and Amboise directly. Failing that, there is always Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia, though these tend to favor higher category hotels than we could ill afford. Finally we found local sites, such as www.france-hotel-guide.com which covered just about every area of France and had 185 hotels just in Paris. By typing "Hotel Mont Blanc Paris" in the search engine, Dogpile brought it up as number 1, and Google number 3. Watch out for hefty booking fees on some sites. Lastly, www.tripadvisor.com is a great site to get other people's opinions of many of the hotels and services you may be using. You can also add your own opinion afterwards for posterity.
For train tickets we initially accessed Rail Europe www.raileurope.com. Not finding senior or child fares, we reverted to the French Railways site www.sncf.com, and saved substantially. Nevertheless, the regular adult fares were comparable, so the advantage of Rail Europe is that you can access all European countries on one site.
Museum and bus/subway passes as well as local sightseeing excursions can be arranged in advance at http://www.conciergerie.com. There are service fees involved. For public transportation within Paris www.ratp.fr. You can also purchase both museum and transportation passes when you arrive at Charles de Gaulle at the RATP office and save on the service fees, which in the end is what we did.
Comments
Rail Europe
I have used the Rail Europe website several times in the past and found it to be a pretty good resource. What I like about them is that they always seem to be trying to improve their services. Its great now that their systems connect directly to the ones in Europe. The one thing you really need to look at (based on personal experience...) is that there is a whole different fare range offered in Europe. Many of the super cheap fares that you find locally cannot be sold to US travelers. So, while you may think you can find it cheaper locally, that's rarely the case. I am now a loyal booker with Rail Europe for at least the past 13 years and will continue my journeys with them!
Rail Europe
Thanks for the comment. The only reason I didn't use RailEurope for this booking was because they did not show the senior citizen discount fare, which I found on the SNCF site.