Information Overload

With my budget and itinerary pretty much mapped out, I had 2 missions:

Find the lowest airfare!

and

Find the BEST hotel rooms for the lowest price!

I subscibed to airfarewatchdog.com and to get fare alerts from kayak.com. And I was determined to wait it out until I could get tickets for $800 or until May--whichever came first.

Kayak.com was awesome, because they graph out prices that they find over a month, so you can kinda guess whether rates are headed up or down and which days of the week tend to cost less for travel.

I turned to Venere.com to search for hotels, TripAdvisor.com to read reviews, and I used Excel to make myself spreadsheets for my findings in each city, sorted by price. And....oh, I spent hours and hours mulling over my options. I also found a few options just through Google or other sites like BBPlanet.com, although I ultimately didn't use most of them. One of my favorite finds I found by following a series of links: LApparthotel.it--I'm so excited for that one!

We found our flight in March on American Airlines for $830 each!

Breaking it down

I noticed from looking on Venere.com that the range of hotel prices varied from place to place.

Also, I knew that we did NOT need to have a rental car in Rome.

So, I got myself a little map of Italy and broke down how much it would cost us per day in each area.

                                  (hotel    (food, car, etc.

Flight 2x1000= 2000 
Rome 5x160=800       90          80

Naples 2x200=400     90        120

Calabria2x220=440   100       120

Sicily 5x220=1100    100       120

                   =4810

Ballpark

We set our cap at $5000.
We were hoping to spend two weeks.
We knew we wanted to visit Rome, Bill wanted to see Pompeii and I wanted to return to Sicily.
So, our initial idea for an itinerary was to arrive in Rome and simply continue south.

We guessed airfare would be about $1000 per ticket.

That left $3000 for hotels, transportation and food---but how much did those cost?? And how long could we afford to stay?

I used OnlineConversion.com to bounce back and forth between dollars and euros while I researched.

I'd used Venere.com before to book hotels, so I used that to research hotel prices in different areas along our planned route.

I mostly researched car rental prices by turning to Google.

And food, I just guessed we could manage to find meals a day for $30 per person--especially if we didn't eat out for EVERY meal.

So my budget started to looked like this:
Airfare                = $2000
Food, $60x14    = $840
Hotels, $110x14 = $1540
Car, $50x14       = $700
TOTAL              =$5080