Flying Out of Athens - Good or Bad?

I've planned a trip backpacking around continental europe this summer, and it's been going along quite smoothly (eurorail pass, flights into Edinburgh, etc). However I'm stuck on how I'm supposed to get OUT of Europe. Our trip takes us down through Germany, Austria, Budapest and Sofia and into Thessaloniki eventually ferrying into Athens, but here's my question:

We paid for 8 days train travel, and by this point have only used 7 of them. Is it cheaper to fly out of Athens (Back to Toronto, Canada) or would it be smarter to use our final day of train travel and get to Istanbul, or anywhere else in the Balkans?

I think you can use your train pass to go back to Budapest and then fly into Canada. Malev [the Hungarian Airlines] have good prices but you'd have to check in advance. Any other combination would be good but you do need to check several options in advance. Even flying from Greece into any other EU country could be good b/c Aegean [Greece's airline] has a very good offer within EU.

These links might help you a bit:

Aegean Airlines

Malev Airlines

quote:

I think you can use your train pass to go back to Budapest and then fly into Canada. Malev [the Hungarian Airlines] have good prices but you'd have to check in advance. Any other combination would be good but you do need to check several options in advance. Even flying from Greece into any other EU country could be good b/c Aegean [Greece's airline] has a very good offer within EU.

These links might help you a bit:

cristina, i never flew with aegean airlines. can you please tell me how their services are?

I haven't tried them yet but the reviews on line sound pretty good. Their offer for EU flights sounds really good though and I'm thinking to try it in August

Malev for example is notorious for not translating the announcements to English. The stewards tell everything in Hungarian and the majority of travelers really don't know what's happening. True, this is an "old" case , dating from 2003 or so, and I'd be curious to know if it changed

Well, the best method to find out it to try some flight searches.

In short, 1-way tickets are a ripoff. One-way tickets to Toronto from most destinations I tried (London, Frankfurt, Budapest, Athens, Istanbul) were all coming in around $1000 +/- $50. The outliers were Paris ($1300), Dublin ($750), and Amsterdam ($920), however, I picked a random date in July, so your experience may vary...on that particular date, you could save a bit by flying Aer Lingus Athens to Dublin and then Continental home.

I would say that, if you haven't already booked your ticket there, it's usually cheaper to book a round-trip ticket, and then use a discounter to get back to your starting point at the end of the trip.

That said, if all the prices are much the same, I highly recommend a trip to Istanbul. It's a wonderful city. It will end up costing a bit more (thanks to visas), but I'd go so far as to say that it's worth it.