First Time Europe: Best Practices

jamesdeluxe said:
No smartphones in the mid-80s
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Hell, no internet at all.

Remember phone cards, cashing travelers cheques, bucket shops (boy, those could be great), essential bulletin boards in key hostels or cafes for exchange of information between travelers, picking up mail at American Express Offices, hostel touts, a new currency in every country, free meals from the hare krishnas, traveling for several days with a stranger, Lonely Planet Guides so specific they sometimes advised you to talk to a particular person behind the desk of a particular business to meet some travel need, etc.? Those were the days!

In 93, over five months, I made it overland all the way from Cairo to Berlin (oversea from the Sinai to Aqaba) before I had to spend more than $7 for a place to sleep. Eventually flew home to JFK on a super-cheap bucket-shop airfare purchased in Amsterdam that required me to get to Brussels in 36 hours. The kids these days don't know what they're missing.
 
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flyover said:
flew home to JFK on a super-cheap bucket-shop airfare
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Odd, I'd never heard that expression. Here's what the internet says:
  • Purpose: Bucket shops emerged to sell last-minute, unsold seats at a discount to fill empty seats on a plane.
  • Mechanism: Airlines would sell a block of these unsold seats to a bucket shop at a reduced rate.
  • Current status: The traditional role of physical bucket shops has largely disappeared due to the rise of online travel agencies and a shift in airline sales strategies.

We used to buy cheap flight tickets through "consolidators." The most well-known place to find them was in the Village Voice classified ads.

An airfare consolidator is a wholesaler that buys airline tickets in bulk from airlines at a discount and resells them to travel agents, who then sell them to the public. These fares are often lower than standard published fares and can provide travel agents with a competitive edge, higher commission potential, and the ability to offer more flexible options to clients.
  • Bulk purchase: Consolidators purchase large blocks of seats directly from airlines at a reduced price.
  • Resale: They then make these discounted tickets available to registered travel agents.
  • Agent markup: Agents can add their own markup to the ticket price, allowing them to still be competitive while earning a commission.
  • Customer-facing: Travel agents use these tickets to serve their clients, often for international travel where consolidator fares are more common.
 
jamesdeluxe said:
Odd that I'd never heard that expression. Here's what the internet says:
  • Purpose: Bucket shops emerged to sell last-minute, unsold seats at a discount to fill empty seats on a plane.
  • Mechanism: Airlines would sell a block of these unsold seats to a bucket shop at a reduced rate.
  • Current status: The traditional role of physical bucket shops has largely disappeared due to the rise of online travel agencies and a shift in airline sales strategies.

We used to buy cheap flight tickets through "consolidators." The most well-known place to find them was in the classified ads in the back of the Village Voice weekly paper.

An airfare consolidator is a wholesaler that buys airline tickets in bulk from airlines at a discount and resells them to travel agents, who then sell them to the public. These fares are often lower than standard published fares and can provide travel agents with a competitive edge, higher commission potential, and the ability to offer more flexible options to clients.
  • Bulk purchase: Consolidators purchase large blocks of seats directly from airlines at a reduced price.
  • Resale: They then make these discounted tickets available to registered travel agents.
  • Agent markup: Agents can add their own markup to the ticket price, allowing them to still be competitive while earning a commission.
  • Customer-facing: Travel agents use these tickets to serve their clients, often for international travel where consolidator fares are more common.
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Yes. I purchased tickets from consolidators (fares to destinations advertised in the back of of the Voice, if memory serves) when in the U.S. to travel abroad.

Once overseas, if you didn't have a RT ticket, bucket shops could be found in many countries. They were quite useful in the days before online dynamic pricing. In Amsterdam for example, I simply walked into the shop, scanned a huge blackboard of offered fares for last-minute(ish) flights from Schipol and several airports in adjoining countries to destinations all over the world, chose my flight from Brussels to JFK, paid, and walked out the door with a paper ticket. How cool was that?

Consolidators also used to advertise and sell cheap, flexible, round-the-world tickets with multiple stops and options to travel overland between points of arriving and departing flights. I never took that kind of trip, but know several people who did.
 
FYI about paying tolls for highways, bridges, etc. in Alps countries.
  1. You pay for tolls in France and Italy the old-fashioned way: at tollbooths with either cash or credit card. They aren't cheap; for example, driving from Milan airport to the Milky Way resorts or Serre Chevalier (less than three hours) will cost you $30 in each direction (the tolls are similarly brutal to drive from Geneva airport to the Tarantaise resorts).
  2. Austria and Switzerland require a "vignette" (pronounced VIN YET) for their respective countries -- what we on the U.S. East Coast would call an EZ-Pass -- which is read by cameras on the autobahns and big tunnels.
  • Vehicles from the major rental car companies in those countries always come with one so you don't need to purchase one if you stay in that country; however, if you pick up your car in a different country (i.e. Germany, France, or Italy) and drive into Austria or Switzerland, you'll need to purchase a vignette at a highway gas station before crossing the border. It costs approx. $15 for ten days. Compared to the tolls in France and Italy, it's a bargain and if you're busted by cameras that read your license plate, they'll send your rental agency a fine for $200, which the agency then puts on your credit card along with an additional processing fee.
  • As a best practice, it can't hurt to ask at the rental counter to make sure that your car has either a sticker on the windshield or a digital vignette linked to the license plate before leaving the airport garage.
 
jamesdeluxe said:
This reminded me of my inaugural European travel experience. During the 1986 summer break after a semester at the University of Nice, I finagled a student loophole to purchase a one-month Interrail pass so I could visit classmates in their home countries. As noted in the current intro video, Interrail is available to Europeans and UKers younger than 26, and back then was priced at approx. half of a Eurail pass.

View attachment 47959

No smartphones in the mid-80s so you entered the itinerary by hand into the booklet ("do not use a pencil!") and got it stamped. I don't recall reservation requirements or surcharges for any trains except the French TGV so it was easy to hop on and off without excessive planning. If you didn't know anyone in a specific city, the time-honored move was to take an overnight train to avoid paying for lodging.

I got a ride from Nice to Rome and activated the pass there:
1. Rome to Florence
2. Florence to Nice
3. Nice to Regensburg (Bavaria)
4. Regensburg to Copenhagen
View attachment 47954

5. Copenhagen to Düsseldorf
6. Düsseldorf to Brussels
7. Brussels to Hamburg
8. Hamburg to West Berlin
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9. I got a ride from Berlin to Regensburg
10. Regensburg to Graz, Austria
11. Graz back to Nice to pick up my belongings
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One last photo op in Nice (cosplaying with a prop cigarette):
View attachment 47960

A tearful goodbye with my GF and a roommate:
View attachment 47961

12. Nice to Milan
13. Milan to Brussels
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At Brussels Airport after more than 5,000 train miles, where I took lovely People Express to Newark and onward to Denver/Boulder:
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That's how it was done. :bow:
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You were a suave looking rooster back in the day @jamesdeluxe
 
I'm copying this exchange from an unrelated thread so we have it here:
EMSC said:
I never said it didn't snow in the Alps. I still maintain that a majority of snow in the alps comes in exactly this type of storm: humongous. With only some snowfall outside of the huge dumps. eg more Sierra like than Colo or BC like, making pre-booked skiing very much a crap shoot at best.
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Tony Crocker said:
The overall average standard deviation was 31%. The French Tarantaise and the high snow regions Andermatt and NW Tyrol/Vorarlberg are in the 25-30% range. In general the low altitudes are over 30%, likely due to rain incidence increasing snow volatility. Isola 2000 is 40%. I think that’s a good assumption for Southern Alps areas completely blocked out from northern or western storms. This would not be true for borderline areas like the Aosta region and Serre Chevalier.
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Can't remember if posted this note before; however, after a quick scan of my 23 Alps destination trips since 2005 -- all but one booked at least a couple months in advance -- I got skunked four times (no days with at least six inches followed by a sloppy-seconds day). Four dry trips out of 20 is a pretty good ratio (better than my pre-booked visits to the western U.S.) but I don't like that all of them occurred in recent years: 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026.

Unfortunately:
Tony Crocker said:
James' enviable luck
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... appears to have run out!
 
Not entirely true. James pulls the plug when he knows it’s bad. He did this for the Pyrenees where we spent the last 3 days.
 
I wouldn't necessarily compare Europe to the frequency and size of Sierra storms.

More like Colorado - less Steamboat, possibly more like Central/SW. Maybe Italy can even resemble Taos, NM for its expert-oriented resorts and infrequent big storms from the Med/Adriatic?
Possibly like the Inland NW is not really the snowiest place in the USA. There can be doughnut periods at Big Sky, and others like Discovery Basin or Sun Valley.

jamesdeluxe said:
Four dry trips out of 20 is a pretty good ratio (better than my pre-booked visits to the western U.S.) but I don't like that all of them occurred in recent years: 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026.
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Regarding @jamesdeluxe's point on dry trips: four dry trips out of twenty is still a solid track record (better than my pre-booked trips in the US West!), though it's tough when they all hit in consecutive recent seasons (2023–2026).

  • 2025 & 2026: Basing out of Zurich or Western Switzerland/Austria is usually super reliable, but that region got caught out twice. Even with an Epic Pass for Austria, pivoting was key—making 3-to-5-hour detours via stopovers in Andermatt or Gstaad to reach Aosta, Italy, or the French Alps saved the day.
  • 2024: Despite a fantastic early season, middle-of-the-season dry spells hit across most of Europe, even if systems were rolling through right before arrival.
  • 2023: Courmayeur was decent—we got some heli-skiing in with a few inches of fresh snow and solid coverage in the Western Alps. If our group had picked Lech, we would’ve hit a proper 30–50 cm dump, but no regrets getting to explore Courmayeur’s off-piste in stable conditions.
By comparison, 2018, 2019, and 2020 were epic. Extended trips to St. Anton, Verbier, Zermatt, and Val d'Isère are easily in my top 10 resort experiences overall.

At the end of the day, the terrain I prefer—exposed alpine faces, couloirs, and hunting for open powder turns—depends heavily on a solid base and stable weather. I'm less of a tree skier, but that's just personal preference rather than a strict recommendation!
 
As a baseline, consider that I have skied 516 days in the US Rockies, with 11% of that being in powder by my criteria. How do the Alps trips stack up? My first trips, Feb. 2004 NASJA 6 days Chamonix and Mar. 2008 Extremely Canadian 5 days La Grave had essentially no powder.

Jan. 2013 was the first road safari: 12 days, 11% powder. That was one fresh snow day on Davos/Parsenn plus some far off piste with Piste-to-Powder guides in the Arlberg, highlight being backside of the Valluga.

Then came the run of good luck:
Feb. 2014 with Liz' NYC ski cub in Zermatt: 6 days, 28% powder, in retrospect very lucky for an advance booked trip to a place with not abundant snowfall. But we did know there was a good snowpack for off piste before we booked.
Jan. 2017 Arlberg: 6, days, 28% powder. This was more luck. Slopes were bare two weeks before but then two big storms before we arrived. It stayed cold the whole week so we still got some good powder the last day at Warth.
Jan/Feb. 2017 more Austria: 9 days, 3% powder. This was mostly low altitude but with sun and excellent on-piste conditions.
Jan/Feb. 2018 Italy, some France: 13 days, 11% powder, nearly all of that on two outstanding days in Cervinia.
Apr. 2018 Val d'Isere: 8 days, 24% powder, 4 days with guides, one of them described by Liz as "best ski day of her life."
Jan/Feb. 2019 Switzerland: 13 days, 24% powder. Cold preserved powder at St. Moritz and Engelberg, fresh snow in Andermatt and Portes-du-Soleil.

Post-COVID regression to the mean?
Mar/Apr. 2022 3000km road trip through all 4 alpine countries: 16 days, 3% powder, bits and pieces at Val Thorens, St. Luc and Les Arcs.
Jan/Feb. 2023 southwestern Alps: 14 days, 9% powder, all of that from an 18 inch storm in the Via Lattea.
Jan/Feb. 2024 Upper Rhone, Jungfrau, Val d'Isere, Aosta: 4% powder, most of that on the close call day at Lauchernalp.
Mar/Apr. 2026 Upper Rhone, Portes-du-Soleil, Grand Massif: 9% powder, mostly at Ovrannaz and Avoriaz.

So the recent years have not been completely skunked for powder, but they have been below average by my long term track record.
 
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ChrisC said:
four dry trips out of twenty is still a solid track record (better than my pre-booked trips in the US West!), though it's tough when they all hit in consecutive recent seasons (2023–2026).
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For the record, I went on two trips in 2023, the first had zero new snow, the second had a fair amount:
 
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