Ready to start thinking about your summer travel plans?
Carve out a few hours from your work day and power up this site on your laptop.
We’ve come a long way since the days of the European railpass — and while they’re still around, they’re almost never a great deal.
Eightydays.me mixes that old “Where shall we go today?” magic with some #2017 technology.
Here’s how it works: Enter your origin city, your destination city, and the number of days you want to travel. Hit a button, and then watch where Eightydays sends you — with your itinerary, flights, rail travel and accommodations all figured out.
The air travel, powered by Kiwi.com, is often astoundingly cheap — it’s no secret that Europe’s seen a wave of fare-lowering competition from myriad airlines, but the computational wizards/algorithms/digital whatever done behind the scenes here is impressive. On just one of our sample itineraries — from Warsaw to Amsterdam, with several stops in between for mid-April — our flights included an $11 one-way between Warsaw and Gdansk (the latter famous for its modern architecture, wouldn’t you know).
Don’t like the results? Just hit the “shuffle” button, and it’ll put together a new tour.
Our perusal didn’t throw up any particular red flags. It looks like you’re required to book at least two weeks out. If anything, the accommodations options were fancier than required — for example, another itinerary involved a couple nights in Dublin at $88 per; a hostel would have been half that. A note from the company’s about page: “NO to early/late departures and far away airports!” The air results we saw were, in that vein, pretty gentle — more 11 a.m. departures than 6 a.m.
For the record, Eightydays.me was the Belarussian start-up of 2016. Looks to us like they chose wisely.
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