International Travel Advice (Read 715 times)

God luck and have fun!

Orbitz will give you a good handle on flight options and pricing; once you know which carriers are relevant going direct to the airline websites is a good idea too.

 Agree - I went to Ireland recently and after painstaking comparisons, I found that booking directly (online) with the hotel and the airlines was cheaper than booking through expedia/travelocity etc. but it's useful to go to those types of sites first to get an idea of what the options are (routes/airlines etc.)

If you need a hotel, I can highly recommend looking at  www.tripadvisor.com and reading all the ratings from other travelers.

If Bulgaria is anything like Germany, many places ( shops and restaurants), other than in high tourist area, might not accept credit cards. Grocery stores here for example do not accept any credit cards.

USAir has better in flight entertainment than United. Lufthansa has great entertainment as well!! Very important for a long flight as someone else pointed out.

I do also agree with another poster...you might want to look at a flight directly to Frankfurt and then use one of the fantastic cheaper airlines here in Europe to fly into Bulgaria. ( I can help you with that!)

ok, enough of my 2 cents! If you want anymore suggestions/tips, let me know

spam

My wife travels internationally all the time with her work and the biggest thing she preaches is that not all airlines are the same.  After several horrible experiences ( including sitting on the tarmac for over 90 minutes in Rome because they "misplaced their stewardess" ) she will never fly an Italian airline again.  Likewise it's not always the big name airlines that are the best.  She flew British Airways New York to London, London to Paris and London to Toronto last year.  On none of those flights did the movie player work.  Likewise, every time she flies Air Canada she has nothing but a great experience.   The flights are usually cheaper, on time, and everything works.  I know that doesn't apply to you because I doubt Air Canada flies from Memphis or wherever to Bulgaria, but the point is look into the airlines carefully.  A crappy flight will go a long way towards ruining the first few days of a trip.

I have a horror story about Alitalia flying between Rome and Zurich and I found it quite funny at the time.

The galley was on the left hand-side of the plane, opposite the last 5 or 6 rows of seats.

As we reached the Alps we ran in to extreme turbulence that had some people screaming and crying. Suddenly there was an explosion from the galley, at which point passengers became hysterical

What had happened was that the emergency dinghy, located outside the galley, had inflated as a result of the turbulence.

The dinghy rapidly grew in size, expanding along the aisle. One of the male flight attendants fruitlessly  jumped on it trying to stop it from expanding further. Another shouted "coltello" and two attendants picked up (metal) knives from passengers' food trays (we were still given metal knives and forks back them.)

They started repeatedly stabbing the dinghy, eventually bursting through causing another giant bang. More hysterical screams and tears.

I was hysterical... hysterically laughing at the farcical events! Of course the passengers at the front of the plane had no idea what was happening and were still screaming and crying in panic. One woman yelled out to her husband in Swiss German "I told you we shouldn't have flown Alitalia!"

There was no apology from either the captain or the crew, which was consistent with the airline's awful customer service policies.