Novi Sad Travel Answers

yep i also advice flight to Budampest and then a bus. Agency Gea ride from Budampest to Novi Sad.

If you are going via Dublin as you suggested, and you are booking well in advance, you can almost certainly get a direct flight to Budapest (Aer Lingus or Malev) for not much more than the combination of Dublin-London followed by London-Zagreb. Plus it will be a lot less hassle. Bear in mind that with budget airlines there are no guaranteed connections, so you need to allow plenty of time between flights to collect your bags and check in for the next one. Once you get to Budapest, as the previous posts said, it's straighforward to get to Novi Sad.

Your biggest problem is how to get to Budapest/Zagreb/Belgrade/what-not. The rest can be done using a train, a horse-driven carriage, by foot, by bus, by airpor transporter mini-bus, bicycle, anyting goes. Besides of comments you did read before, also watching for www.jat.com specials from London to Belgrade can make sense. The "official" airlines like Malev/Lingus/Croatian/JAT/British/etc. sometimes sell tickets for less than "low cost" airlines. All these "national carrier" airlines have partner airlines (other national carriers), so if any major delay happens you can complain and if you are flexible you will be re-booked and can fly usually ASAP - sometimes even if it is your fault (missing the plane). With low-cost carriers this is not the case. If the Wizzair plane breaks down than you never will be re-booked to, say, Croatian or JAT even if you are ready to fly to Zagreb or Belgrade instead of Budapest. You have to wait maybe days. Sometimes low-cost carriers cancel flights for no legal reason (many times insufficient number of passengers was a "good" reason for cancelation) and people are just scr**ed - no flight at all, not even in a week. It was reported, some low-cost carriers from Central Europe even produced fake e-mails as some stranded passengers took them to court.

Usual low-cost scr**w-up looks like this: - you take some transportation from Dublin to Luton because you booked a £10 (+tax) flight to Vienna with "SmartWizzWingsSky Air". From Vienna you got a train special (29 Euro) to Belgrade. - someone at Luton will tell you, the todays' flight by "SmartWizzWingsSky Air" to Vienna is canceled (that makes your train ticket worthless, of course - besides everything there is automatically also a 29 Euro loss, but this is just the iceing on the cake). - You say, there is an Austrian flight to Vienna and you would like to fly. They tell you, number one, Austrian flies form Heathrow, number two they have nothng to do with Austrian, and besides, they sent you an e-mail a day ago informing, their flight is canceled. The e-mail is a fake. - You say, you are ready to fly with them to Zagreb instead of Vienna which is scheduled in few hours - They say, because of e-mail you only option is to fly with them to Vienna next week and their flight to Zagreb is also canceled. Sometimes you will hear a "polite" comment like "if you like Zagreb or Vienna that much, take Croatian Airline or Austrian next time". No joke, such comments did happen. And as you listen to them you will certainly agree: you should take Austrian or Croatian instead of "SmartWizzWingsSky Air". - You ask them: "So I am scr**d"? They tell you (happend with me last Summer as I asked the agent of TED - a low-cost subsidiery of United): "Yes, you are". Indeed, you are. You cannot go back home (too expensive) and going "forward" is also expensive. Besides, if you go back to Dublin - you face the same dilemma immediately. If you wait in London - you have to find a place where to sleep and London is expensive. Your smartest choice at that point would be to transfer to Heathrow and take ASAP any national carrier which is going roughly in the direction of Novi Sad for a price you can afford. I lost1000 last year exactly this way.

And finally you can read about opinions of other passengers. Sh**t happens with every airline, so I would look for "how the issue is solved and was it solved at all?" rather than spotless record of service. I had impression, on some airlines you will essentially get from "A" to "B" even if the bathrooms are dirty and chicken tasts awful. With some airlines it's not the case. airlinequality.com/Forum/cro... airlinequality.com/Forum/aer... airlinequality.com/Forum/mal... airlinequality.com/Forum/jat... airlinequality.com/Forum/cze... -- ** -- ** -- airlinequality.com/Forum/wiz... airlinequality.com/Forum/sky... airlinequality.com/Forum/sma... more issues: expats.cz/prague/directory_r... marcsmessages.typepad.com/mm... tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g2...

Wow -- thanks for the tip. I'm definitely planning on flying Malev from Dublin to Budapest. It's just slightly more expensive than the low-cost airlines. I may end up flying directly from the US to Budapest -- that depends on a fellowship I'm waiting to hear about. I'll check out the webpages you suggested. It looks like I'll be flying out of Dubrovnik back to either Budapest or Dublin, depending on where I end up flying into on the transatlantic flight.

Oh, you did not say, you are in the US. In this case - unless you really insist to visit Dublin - call Eva from European Travel Services, 1-800-675-0559. She has good deals into Budapest and Belgrade on Lufthansa, sometimes Malev. Lufthansa is a soul-less, extremely efficient company which will take you from "A" to "B" with efficiency matched probably only by Singapore Air. You won't see any smile - just a spotless service and rock-bottom price. More often than not you will get LH tickets from a person with good contacts much chepaer than on any other airline. Just make sure, it's LH and not a code-share with United or TED. If you are on the East Coast, try SQ going to Frankfurt. SQ's on-line prices are one of the best and even Lufthansa looks disorganised compared with SQ. You have to experience to believe your eyes how things (customer service, on-board service, etc.) can be made. You will enter a coreography show nearly of the same magnitude as, say, Ari Rang - from the moment you appear at the ticket counter. No wonder, SQ holds the "world best airline" title for like 20 years in the row. The last thing you need is your body going on strike for a week or two before/after the flight. Flying SQ or LH will cut sometimes this ting to a few hours or nothing. Translate it ino and you see a huge profit. Also keep in mind, SQ, YU and LH do code-share in Europe. You may get one of the YU ur LH flights into Belgrade as part of your SQ ticket. Also there is an MA flight daily form East Coast to BUD as well as OK flight to PRG. Of course, MA or OK are much worse than Singapore Air - but their service is still miles above United. The disadvantege of Singapore is, it lands only in Frankfurt, with all amazing service you still have to arrange rail tickets between Fankfurt and Budapest (39 Euro on-line one-way) and Budapest and N.Sad (ca. 12 Euro every day). Using OK or MA you are close to Novi Sad. Of course, if SQ messes things up (remember, being world's best airline does not mean a particular flight is trouble-free) they will certainly arrange your transportaion between Frankfurt and Budapest, so your 30 Euro train ticket won't be lost, in the worst case you reach by airlpane. I have doubt, Wizzair or Ryanair or even United would do it.