Feb 21

Feb 21 Booking for Morocco: Part I

We get to move from the planning stage into the booking stage now. If you missed the planning post, you can read it here. Since I don’t plan trips out to the last detail, I don’t book them that way either. I always book the biggest risk and biggest ticket items first. That usually means the flights.

Main Flights

It’s booking day, so I go back to Google Flights and skyscanner to double check for the best price. I checked all of my routes and dates.

Option 1 Chicago-Barcelona, RT
Option 2 Chicago-Rome, RT
Option 3 Chicago-Barcelona, Rome-Chicago, MC

Now, the lesser flights

Now that we know our beginning and end, let’s make sure we can hop continent to continent. The flight into and out of Morocco.

We opted for the Regular option so that we could get our carry on bags along with us. Next flight.

We opted for the flight into Pisa rather than Rome to optimize for the pricing. We like Florence anyway, so we figure we’ll hit our favorite restaurant in Florence for lunch and see where the day takes us.

Here are we, altogether at $538.13!

The next move for me in the booking process is to move on to the movement between the cities in Morocco. How easy will it be to get around? How easily can we just book on the go? It’s research time.

Trip Savvy to the rescue again with a great article on train travel in Morocco.

According to these guys, you can’t book train travel outside of Morocco. That implies to me that it won’t be as big of a deal to book on the fly. Now, the research I did before suggested that each of these train rides were about $20 USD. We’ll have to see what it’s like when I’m there.

The next reservation of interest is the transit from Barcelona airport to downtown. According to the airport’s website, we can pick these up on the ground. Great! I love minimizing reservations ahead of time.

Transit from Pisa to wherever and ultimately to Rome will be a piece of cake. For the sake of my own sanity, I check Eurail just to see what a single country pass will run me. It looks like $382 for the both of us for 3 days of travel. That’s more than we’d even really need.

For some back of the napkin math: If we took the train for each leg, it would be: $10 from Pisa to Florence. Another $35 from Florence to Rome.

Compare these:

$10 + $35 = $45 per person
2 people x $45 per person = $90
$382 - $90 = $292 total savings

Do I really think we will book an additional $300 worth of rail travel? Probably not. It seems better to book these tickets on the fly. Even if we bump it up to first class seats on the train, we’re still under $50 for the longest leg of that journey.

This pretty much brings us to a close until we decide which hotels we will book in advance. I hope that you’ve enjoyed Part I of the Booking Morocco lineup. Check back soon to see how we search for lodging in places we’ve never been and how we choose to book each one.

Thanks, y’all!