I am figuring out how to maximize a 6 day trip to Norway. To make the most of the time, we narrowed down our top Winter destinations to Oslo and Bergen, the two biggest cities in Norway. Two of the days we’ll be doing Norway in a Nutshell to enjoy the beautiful scenery, including steam train travel and fjords. That gives us three nights and two full days in Oslo and three nights and two full days in Bergen.
However, to make that last night in Bergen happen, we have to fly directly from Bergen to the Oslo airport in time for our flight to London at 11:30 am and then on to Atlanta. Great news is that there are a lot of direct flights every day and they are super inexpensive (at least at the moment with the dollar so strong). There are options for us both to fly for about $170 total. Flying directly gives us more time in Bergen instead of having to get back to Oslo, spend the night, plus have all the travel time to and from the airport. From what I can find on the airport’s map it looks like it is small and we won’t have to go back through security once we land if we do carry on luggage (check out my blog on The Importance of Packing Light). There will be passport control but again, what I read shows that it shouldn’t take too long.
Four Things to Figure out Before Booking
- What is the latest flight we can catch from Bergen to make the flight to London from Oslo?
- Will our carry on luggage be considered carry-on on a smaller European domestic airline?
- What if our flight time to London changes in either direction which is highly possible as I just got a time change notification today for our flight from London to Oslo;
- What to do about the booking sites being in Norwegian, which I don’t speak.
It’s tempting to just put this part of the trip planning off but we are only 6 weeks out and so decisions need to be made. As always, I am weighing budget, comfort and making this as stress free as possible. Here are some possible options:
- Buy the most expensive ticket option that allows for full refunds, flight changes, and checked luggage (just in case our carry-on doesn’t count as carry-on and they make us check it at the gate). This will cost us $48 more.
- Take the earliest possible flight to allow for flexibility if our flight to London gets moved up. This means losing several hours of sleep the day before a long day of international travel.
- Go ahead and cancel one night of our Bergen Airbnb, fly out of Bergen late the night before, and get a hotel near the Oslo airport. This adds more logistics (every time you have to book in and out of a place is a bit of a pain), but allows flexibility based on our flight out. It also means two instead of one security line (remember, I hate lines).
- Wait and hope there are still flight options at a decent price once our London flight time seems secure.
What Did We Decide to Do?
After talking through the options with Jim, my husband, he was for option 3 and I was leaning towards option 1. A few minutes searching found that hotels by the Oslo airport are around $150 a night. Our Airbnb is only $90 a night. But, getting the refundable tickets is about $50 more so budget really isn’t enough of a factor to consider. If we leave Bergen late at night it also means we have no Airbnb for our luggage to stay all day. A quick search found that we can leave our luggage at a nearby train station for about $10 for the day. In my searching I also found the Norwegian Airlines site in English (but with Euros for prices not dollars) so I can accurately find out about the luggage policy. With either ticket price we get a rolling carry-on and a checked bag. Even though we don’t plan on checking a bag, if our bags are too big and they make us gate check them we shouldn’t have to pay any more. Those details figured out, I decided to actually book the flight the evening before so we could have maximum flexibility the day of our flights home. If we stay at a hotel that is only an 8 minute walk to the terminal, we can sleep in and if our flight time to London does change we won’t have to deal with any logistics while on our trip. It’s now simply a matter of adjusting our Airbnb stay with a reservation modification request and booking the hotel by the airport!
To make all this planning possible I used my tried and true plan explained in How to Plan a Stress-free Trip on a Budget. Interested in reading more on planning a trip to Norway? Check out my blog, Planning a Trip to Norway.
