Italy Trip Planning Tips: Save Time, Get The Best Value & Fun

Researching and planning your trip to Italy can be a monumental, time consuming task, especially if you lead a busy life with never ending To Do lists.

An article I read said that lack of time to research and plan a trip prevents many people from traveling so they stay home.

Here are seven steps and tips on how to reduce your Italian trip research and planning time. Life is too short not to enjoy Italy!

1. Ask yourself, "What is most important on this trip to Italy?" For example, if you want to focus on wines, spend more time in the Piedmont or Tuscany wine country and less in the big cities.

If this is your first trip to Italy and you want to visit Venice, Florence and Rome, plus a cooking tour, and all are equally important to you, you could plan on two or three days in each city and a four day cooking tour. Focusing on what you really want will shorten your research time.

2. What if you don't know what regions you want to visit and what you want to do? Instead of endlessly searching the Net and getting overwhelmed with all the information you find, go to your local library and borrow a guide book to Italy. Yes, low tech is faster in my opinion!

Skim through it region by region. Decide what regions, cities and towns appeal and what sights and things to do in those places really interest you. Make a list. Then you can research accommodation in those regions and tours matching your interests on the Net.

For an idea of hotel choices and costs, venerecom is an easy to use site with many levels of accommodation all over Italy as well as travelers' reviews. I've used this site a few times to book rooms online and all went well.

3. With your list of places in mind, look at a map of Italy and decide on the most efficient route so you don't back track along the same routes and waste time and money.

A north to south route, like starting in Venice and finishing in Naples, or a south to north route, like starting in Sicily and finishing in Florence, works well.

If you want to go to Cinque Terre on the Riviera or Ravenna on the Adriatic, take a detour off your north to south route and return to it. You can fly into one airport and out of another airport.

A circle route works well too. For example, start in Venice, go west to Lake Garda, farther west to Piedmont, south to Cinque Terre, east to Florence, north to Bologna and north to Venice.

4. List the places you'll visit with roughly how much time you plan to spend in each one. If you're the spontaneous type, allow flexible time to make changes in your plans. At least you have a basic outline of your trip that you can change as you travel.

5. Remember to allow for travel time between places. For example, from Florence to Rome on the fast Eurostar train is about 90 minutes, so allow half a day from your Florence hotel door to your Rome hotel door. Do not take regional trains, a.k.a. the slow trains, or Florence to Rome will turn into a three and a half hour ordeal.

6. Decide if you want to travel by train or rent a car. If you're exploring the countryside and its small towns, a car is a must. Local buses in many country areas are few and many double as school buses.

If you're traveling mainly to major cities, stick to the train so you avoid chaotic city traffic, frustrating one way streets and expensive, difficult to find parking.

The Italian train system is excellent in most of my experience. At trenitaliacom, the Italian train web site, you can enter your departing place, time of travel and arriving place and it spits out a choice of schedules for you. I use it all the time! Great for trip planning!

7. Flight planning. Going to or from Italy, avoid long layovers in connecting airports. If you have to wait four hours for your connecting flight in England or Germany to Italy, you'll arrive even more tired.

Going home from Italy, avoid early morning flights, like a 6:00 a.m. departure. You'll have to be at the airport around 4:00 a.m. and leave your hotel in the middle of the night. If you're flying out of any city in the morning or early afternoon, make sure you stay in that city the night before.

In both of these cases, you won't sleep much on your last night and you're not being good to yourself at the end of your holiday.

Have fun researching and planning your trip using these systematic tips so you save time and get the most value and fun out of your trip. Half of the delight in traveling is looking forward to the trip and researching it. Leave yourself enough time to do that as a gift to yourself.

Enjoy your travels! Buon viaggio!