attitudetravel
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(Date Posted:02/05/2004 2:52 AM)
Showoff.
I would think the cheapest and easiest way would be to take a cheap RyanAir flight from London Stansted to Lubeck, transfer to Hamburg airport and take a bexx flight from Hamburg to Sofia.
As luck would have it, I'm doing exactly that on April 1st-2nd.
If you want to come along, let me know and I'll post the exact details.
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Alan Lansdowne
Editor, attitudetravel.com
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Alsky
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(Date Posted:02/05/2004 1:15 PM)
That's pretty much what I thought too. The only other option I was considering was Sky Europe (I think) to Budapest and taking a train from there, but my knowledge of trains in Eastern Europe isn't that good and I've no idea how long it would take or how much it would cost. Yes, please do send details of your itinerary and what you plan to be getting up to.
Blagodarya i dovizhdane!
Al
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(Date Posted:02/05/2004 6:12 PM)
I'm not sure it would be all that cheap to take a train from Budapest to Sofia.
The most direct international trains run through Romania before swinging south towards the Romanian-Bulgarian border. I looked at something similar in February 2000 when I was trying to get from Budapest to Istanbul. A direct international train was very expensive and taking regional trains and changing at the borders to limit the cost drove the journey time up to about three days!
In the end I bought a $60 one way ticket from Budapest to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines - it was a lot cheaper than the train.
Another relatively cheap option to get to Sofia from London, might be to take a Eurolines coach... but I imagine that would be a fairly agonising experience.
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Alan Lansdowne
Editor, attitudetravel.com
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attitudetravel
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(Date Posted:02/10/2004 5:33 PM)
Getting back to the itinerary in question...
I am flying from Hamburg to Sofia on bexx air on April 2nd - departing at 18.30 and arriving at 22.10 local time.
(I also have a return flight from Sofia to Hamburg on April 16th at 15.30).
I haven't booked my London-Stansted to Hamburg Lubeck leg of the journey yet, but I'd better get cracking because RyanAir currently have a sale on until midnight on Thursday and after that tickets might not be so cheap. (See Low Cost Airline Special Offers for more details).
Do these dates - or at least the outbound one sound convenient to you?
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Alan Lansdowne
Editor, attitudetravel.com
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Alsky
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(Date Posted:02/11/2004 12:36 AM)
Sounds good. I've just checked when the holidays end and it's the 18th, so that's OK. Do you mind if I ask any of my fellow students tomorrow if they're interested? I doubt many of them will be -there's only about ten of us (which is actually bloody good for Bulgarian) and at least half the class seem to be doing it just to fill up their module quota.
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(Date Posted:02/11/2004 2:04 AM)
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Alan Lansdowne
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Alsky
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(Date Posted:02/11/2004 8:24 AM)
Great; I'll ask them later today. To be honest, from the research I've been doing tonight (which has, as you'll see, kept me up until 6 am ) I'm not sure the Hamburg route is the best, principally because one has to transfer between airports (how long does it take to transfer between them)? Cologne (with German Wings) or Dusseldorf (with Air Berlin) seem marginally better bets -and they're as cheap, if not cheaper than Ryanair (you'll have noticed that Ryanair's special offer runs out, most inconvenienty, on March 31st -unless you fancy spending a couple of days in Northern Germany, which I'm not against).
Moderator: Alan L
Edit Reason: Second paragraph off-topic. Moved to a new thread.
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(Date Posted:02/11/2004 2:34 PM)
I think you're right. When I booked my bexx flight back at the beginning of January, germanwings was not running flights from London Stansted to Cologne Bonn - only from Edinburgh.
Given that it has now reintroduced flights from London to Cologne Bonn though:
germanwings: London Stansted-Cologne Bonn
bexx: Cologne Bonn-Sofia
may very well be your least expensive and best time-saving option.
As for flying Air Berlin to Dusseldorf... I have a feeling that the Dusseldorf airport which bexx flies to is actually Dusseldorf Niederrhein, not Dusseldorf. Though I couldn't get immediate confirmation from the bexx site, so if you need this checked, I'll call the director and confirm.
As for spending a couple of days in northern Germany, Lubeck is a lovely town with lots to see and do and the last time I was there, in September 2002, I only had a few hours to walk around, so I promised myself I would go back and give it a good crack of the whip.
Let me know if you decide to fly to Sofia via Cologne Bonn or via a day or so in Lubeck.
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Alan Lansdowne
Editor, attitudetravel.com
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Alsky
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(Date Posted:02/14/2004 10:25 PM)
Hi again. I've spoken to my fellow students, who showed a distressing lack of interest, but there you go. Our teacher advises us that Bulgaria Air (http://www.balkanair.co.uk/) do good deals, and it's true that they have an offer of London-Sofia for ?54 return. Unfortunately, their flight schedule only goes up to the end of March, so I'm going to ask them what they're doing for April. To be honest, thinking about it, Bexx's flights don't seem to be all that good a deal (by low-cost standards); in any case, it appears that the cheapest price you can get for a flight from Germany to Bulgaria on the date we're interested in is now 119 Euros 1-way (I can't travel on a different day with Bexx because of term dates). With taxes that makes around 185 quid (coincidentally, almost exactly the same as a Eurolines return trip by coach from London to Sofia, and if you add an extra 50 or so for the cost of getting from the UK to Germany you can see that a direct flight might well be the better option.
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(Date Posted:02/15/2004 2:48 AM)
Hmmm... I see. I think the reason why there may not be too many really good deals left on bexx for the dates you want to fly is because it isn't due to start operating flights until late March... and until the middle of January there was a half price Spring Sale on the first set of tickets. So you can imagine they got snapped up pretty quickly... leaving only the higher priced tickets. (Not to mention the fact that bexx doesn't fly to the UK yet...).
But I've thought of something else which might be worth a quick check before you buy your return flight on BalkanAir...
If you go to the Dutch Low Cost Airlines page, you'll see that RyanAir fly to Eindhoven (and no-one in Europe knows RyanAir better than you, my friend) and a little-known airline called Corendon flies from Eindhoven to Istanbul for 19 euros.
That's 19 euros.
Of course, we both know that's impossibly cheap, but if you wouldn't mind flying to Eindhoven to check for me, I'll buy you a pint when you eventually make it to Sofia .
Istanbul to Plovdiv is a breeze. You can take a very cheap overnight coach from Esenler coach station. I did it in December 1999 and shared cigarettes with some Serbian students on the Turkish-Bulgarian border whilst listening to their take on Milosevic and the thugs he was recruiting into the then Yugoslav police force. Lots of fun.
Of course, if Stansted-Eindhoven-Istanbul-Plovdiv sounds like too much of an adventure, I'd fly direct...
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Alan Lansdowne
Editor, attitudetravel.com
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Alsky
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(Date Posted:02/15/2004 11:22 AM)
Ah-ha-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha! You know, Alan, I think I must be going mad. I've just checked my last post, and it appears that I was actually suggesting -get this- taking a direct flight to my intended destination! Silly me... Seriously, on certain dates (though not ours) Corendon do indeed fly Eindhoven-Istanbul for the remarkable price of 19 Euros. Taxes, etc., make it an 88 Euro return trip (about 60 quid), which one can't really argue about. RyanAir London-Eindhoven is around 40 quid at its cheapest. So overall, it would be around 140 quid for UK-Turkey return at the start of April.
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Alsky
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(Date Posted:02/16/2004 1:42 PM)
Hmm. It does look like it's too late to make any of the low-cost options worthwhile. So I've bought a return ticket with Bulgaria Air/Balkan Air Tours, departing 30 March & returning 16 April. (As far as I can gather, Balkan Air actually went bust in 2001, and was semi-reincarnated as Balkan Air Tours in 2002, which was renamed as Bulgarian Air in 2003).
Al
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attitudetravel
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(Date Posted:02/16/2004 1:57 PM)
Good stuff. I'll see you in Sofia then.
Do you have any plans, by the way? Is it all academic research assignments or are you mostly free to do what you want? I'm planning on going to Veliko Tarnovo and one or two other places and I'm about four years overdue to go and visit two friends Rosa and Drago in Plovdiv.
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Alan Lansdowne
Editor, attitudetravel.com
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Alsky
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(Date Posted:02/17/2004 12:00 AM)
None of it's academic research assignments -just thought that seeing as though I'm studying the language I might as well go and visit the place (having failed miserably to do so the last time I tried Bulgarian). And I need a holiday, so it's a natural choice. I'm looking forward to it. Have you any ideas about accommodation?
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(Date Posted:02/17/2004 2:47 PM)
Last time I was in Bulgaria, accommodation options were few and far between. I rented a room in Sofia, stayed in a private home in Melnik where the landlady was letting out a spare room for a bit of extra cash, blagged my way into staying two nights in the student obshzhitije in Blagoevgrad, spent one night in a towerblock flat in Plovdiv (converted into a pension of sorts) and the second night with Drago, one of a group of local students who I'd met in a bar.
I imagine that there are a few more hostels and pensions running now than there were four and a half years ago.
If not, you'll have a good chance to practice your Bulgarian (and teach me how to improve my Russian-derived pidgin variant).
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Alan Lansdowne
Editor, attitudetravel.com
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Alsky
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(Date Posted:02/18/2004 8:30 PM)
Just to let you know that my tickets have arrived.
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