There are millions of things to do in Europe.
Millions more if you have money.

I spent the past summer there. It was easy to decide what to do. I had a focus. Hiking.

Lonely Planet Western Europe provided me a list of best hiking regions.

Hitting many of the “best hikes” did involve a lot of travel on the 3 main kinds of airlines:

Full service Airlines
Discount Airlines
Charter Airlines

I flew no full-service airlines. Here is a sampling of the flights I took during high season:

Halifax to London = CAD$200 – Thomas Cook (Charter)
London to Venice = CAD$100 – EasyJet

Glasgow to Barcelona = CAD146.96 – RyanAir (world’s worst airline)
Bilbao to Glasgow = CAD$159.36 – EasyJet

Glasgow to Calgary = CAD$227.24 – FlyGlobeSpan (Charter)

I highly recommend flyglobespan.com. Their charters run only seasonally. And only once a week. But flying direct from Calgary or Vancouver is wonderful for that low fare.

Average airfares are still increasing, I believe. But lowest airfares are as low as they’ve ever been as airlines get better and better at filling all the seats.

I normally start with two websites:

Mobbissimo.com
Yahoo Travel (formerly Fare Chase)

From there I might compare with other aggregation sites like Kayak, if necessary.

Then I try to find the flight / fare on the website for the carrier, and buy direct, online.

If you are flexible on dates and times, you can often get a low fare. The further in advance of the flight, the better. For Charters it’s worth cross checking with a travel agent.

Flying to and from Europe … and between European nations is very inexpensive. Cheaper than train or bus in most cases.