Vacation package
Portugal Independent, Nine Days
Nine days between Lisbon, the coast and Porto with nobody travelling with you, but with every hotel held, every train booked and every transfer arranged before you leave. Quoted per person for two sharing. This is the middle of the site: not a tour, not a pile of tabs at midnight.
What independent means here
It means we do the parts that are annoying at a distance and you do the parts that are the holiday.
Booking a Portuguese train from Idaho is not hard, exactly; it is just a small tax of confusion, in a language you do not read, on a site that will sell you a ticket without a seat reservation and let you find out on the platform. Holding a room in a small hotel that does not appear on the big sites is similar. Those are the parts we take.
What we do not take is your day. Nobody meets you at nine in the morning. There is no coach.
from $1,760 per person, based on two sharing
This is a starting figure for the season shown. The final price is confirmed in writing before anything is booked and depends on your dates, the number travelling and what is available when we ask. How a price is put together.
Why there is no rental car
You could hire one. Between these three places it would cost you money, parking anxiety and at least two arguments, and it would be slower than the train on the main leg.
If your version of this trip goes somewhere the train does not, we will price the car in and say so. But the default is deliberate, and this is the sort of thing an agency that is paid the same either way can afford to be honest about.
| Leg | What we book | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Lisbon to the coast or wine country | Train, or a private transfer where the last stretch is rural | The road is the slower option and the parking at the far end is the problem |
| The middle to Porto | Train, reserved seats | It is fast, it is frequent, and it lands you in the middle of the city |
| Airports at both ends | Private transfer | It is the one place where a fixed price beats working it out tired |
The document you actually get
The deliverable on an independent trip is paper. One document, in order by day, with the hotel addresses in Portuguese as well as English so a taxi driver can read them, the train times, every reference number, and what to do if a train is cancelled.
It sounds unglamorous. It is the thing people write to us about afterwards.
The six questions, answered
| Where and how long | Nine days across three bases, usually Lisbon, somewhere on the coast or in the wine country, and Porto, joined by train. You move twice and unpack three times, and the days in between are entirely yours. |
|---|---|
| What kind of trip | Independent. No guide, no group, no fixed schedule. What is arranged is the structure: rooms held, trains booked with seat reservations, airport transfers at both ends, and a written document that says what happens on which day and what to do if it does not. |
| What is included | Round trip flights from Boise, eight nights in small and mid sized hotels with breakfast, train tickets between the bases with reserved seats, transfers between airports and hotels, and a written itinerary with addresses, times, reference numbers and a telephone number that reaches somebody. |
| What is not included | Meals other than breakfast. Entries to sites and museums, which are almost all inexpensive and better bought on the day. Any car hire, which this itinerary is built to avoid. Optional day trips, which we will happily book or leave to you. Travel insurance. |
| When it makes sense, and when it does not | It makes sense from March to June and from September to early November, which is the best value window in western Europe and the reason we sell more of this than anything else in the spring. It works in summer, hot and busy and dearer. Winter is mild, wet, very cheap and genuinely pleasant if you do not need to be on a beach. |
| What is settled when we confirm | Each hotel by name and address, the train services with times and seat reservations, the transfer arrangements, what is included at each hotel, the total for your party, the deposit and balance dates, and the cancellation terms for each element, which differ between the hotels and the rail tickets. |