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My late summer trip Kosice, Slovakia to Salzburg, Austria

Next month I am touring Slovakia and Austria for two weeks. I have figured out the first part of the trip with a Wizz Air nonstop flight booked from London Luton to Kosice in eastern Slovakia. The end of my itinerary is about 850 km west in Salzburg, Austria where I have booked 3 hotel nights before flying British Airways and American Airlines back to London and Los Angeles.

The middle bits of the Slovakia trip remain to be planned. My preliminary plan is to spend time in a couple of the 9 National Parks of Slovakia with a focus on the High Tatras and Low Tatras of the Carpathian Mountain Range. There are some fantastic looking resorts around these parks for under $80 per night. I even found a cottage in Slovak Paradise National Park the other day I could have rented for $93 for 7 nights, if only I had that much time to linger in the mountains. Alternatively, there are full-service resort hotels for $75 per night like Panorama Resort in the High Tatras.

Panorama Resort

Hotel Panorama, Štrbské Pleso, Slovakia.

Kosice has a DoubleTree Hotel with rates around 63EUR and even lower on OTA sites like Priceline. I’ll be looking to score a Best Rate Guarantee if I can. In different trip reports I have read some people prefer Slovakia’s second largest city Kosice over Bratislava. I plan to check out both cities and form my own opinion.

Wyndham Rewards are proving to be good value for this trip with four nights booked in London and Salzburg. 12,000 points for Wyndham Rewards GoFast reward nights dropped the room rates for 4 hotel nights from $575 USD to $245 USD. That is a fantastic $27.50 per 1,000 points redemption value. I bought Wyndham Rewards points for $6/1,000 points through U.S. Travel Association’s Daily Getaways sale a few years ago and I judiciously redeem them for GoFast reward stays to get great redemption value.

Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, will be another destination I plan to spend a couple of days.

Vienna I will likely skip this trip since I am flying back to Vienna at Christmas on the return portion of my $490 American Airlines open-jaw ticket.

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4 Comments

  • DaninMCI August 12, 2016

    Nice I’m heading to Vienna, Munich, Salzburg and Milan the first 2 weeks of September. We are staying 3 nights at the Crowne Plaza in Salzburg (on points of course). The weather may be perfect if we can avoid the rain.
    Happy travels.

  • karung99 August 12, 2016

    Slovakia is on bucket lists, looking forward for the report. I heard a lots of things in this tiny country.

  • A August 12, 2016

    Are you going/have you gone to Halstatt? Also,are you driving there?

  • Ric Garrido August 13, 2016

    @A – Not driving. I always take public transportation in Europe. One of my favorite aspects of life in Europe is the availability of public transportation, although I am finding it a bit sketchy for Slovakia in my web searches.

    Never been to Halstatt. Looks like beautiful mountain lake country. https://www.salzwelten.at/en/hallstatt/route/

    I have been to Salzburg, Austria.

    I was thought to be lost in a salt mine there when I was ten years old and became separated from my group tour on an organized day trip from the US Army resort at Berchtesgaden, Germany, I was with some family friends, three brothers 9, 11 and 15 and being chaperoned by the 15 year old boy. I lost my salt mine tour ticket while we were playing in the line during the long wait for the cable car descent into the mine.

    As I searched for my ticket, my friends went into the mine and by the time someone found my missing ticket for me, I did the polite thing and went to the back of the line and waited for the cable car into the salt mine. Turned out my friends went on one tour and I ended up in a different tour group. Their tour finished an hour before my tour. At one point I saw my friends down in a cavern getting into an elevator while I was still in the back of the line at the top of a long slide. My group did not go up the same elevators. We got on a boat for an underground water cruise through the salt mine.

    I got a deluxe tour of the salt mine and nearly caused an international incident.

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