Tweaking the itinerary

Some call it obsessing but I prefer to think of it as "tweaking" the itinerary. 

After turning it upside down three times discovering tripadvisor.com  has made planning so much easier and great fun. Tripadvisor is an unbelievably good site to ask travel related questions from people who have been or are actually in the places you intend to visit.  

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Getting There

Discovering Qantas released seats 355 days in advance we checked and there were premium economy seats.  Having spoken to someone at Qantas they suggested we book the Sydney to London and London to Rome tickets together.  Bad advice. We waited five days and all the Qantas Sydney to London premium flights were gone.  British Airways still had a premium flyer seats so we grabbed them.  

Qantas doesn't fly from London to Rome so we booked British Airways one way. We are returning from Greece to London via Monarch Airways as part of the yacht tour we are doing in the Ionian Islands.

For the return flight London to Sydney we got the only two Qantas premium economy frequent flyer seats available the minute after they were released on the internet.  At the time you couldn't get seat allocation with Qantas until 24 hours before flight departure. 

Three months to go and we discovered Qantas now allow you to book allocated seats.  Unfortunately others had discovered this earlier and we didn't get window seats. At the same time we paid extra to book window seats with British Air. 

Planning

Aiming for Europe in 2011 using frequent flyer points we discovered we had to book flights 355 days in advance.  So we had to organise our itinerary insanely early to make sure we booked the right flights. It all revolved around the two week sailing holiday and avoiding school holidays for England, Greece, Italy and Germany just to be sure we would avoid crowds.

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