My best friend and I are seniors in high school. For her graduation gift, her dad is sending her and I to Europe. We want to go to London and Paris for sure. We also are thinking of taking trains around to other countries. We would like to keep the price reasonable though we realize this is not a very cheap trip. So I'm wondering what advice anybody has on where to book flights and hotels, where else to go, and how long to stay there. We're spending the first 3 days in Disneyland Paris for sure. We're traveling this coming summer after we've graduated. Thanks!
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This website is excellent for identifying the budget airlines that fly between a given pair of cities in Europe: http://www.whichbudget.com/ There are links to the airline sites, so you can check specific schedules and prices. It's often cheaper than the trains. I found a flight roundtrip from Milan to Amsterdam for 90 euro a few weeks ago and found a 36 euro fare from Pisa to Eindhoven earlier in the week. It's often useful to check alternative airports in nearby cities to get the best prices.
Having said that, the trains are a good, and often economical, way to travel here. You can use the night trains to save on a hotel/hostel cost if you plan efficiently and book early enough to get the discount prices. A good site for checking the schedules in Europe is: http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en
You'll have a great time planning this. It would be hard to go wrong no matter what itenerary you choose, but you might consider going on from Paris to Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, … or from Paris to Barcelona, then back across the south of France into Italy – Venice, Florence, Rome …
I did the same thing for my daughter when she graduated in the US, and they had a great time exploring.