San Francisco Chronicle_Ed Perkins on Travel: Eastern European cities give cheaper thrills (August 16)

16.08.2007

If a late-summer trip to Europe is on your wish list, you can still find some destinations where a week's visit won't break the bank. Priceline, the big online travel site, recently polled its in-house experts on the best places to visit in Eastern Europe (a term that often includes former Iron Bloc countries that are technically in Central Europe). Priceline's mavens identified five such cities, but they could easily have included a few others.

In general, major cities in Eastern European countries offer similar combinations of Old World charm, history, nightlife and great food. Many of these historic cities include well-preserved "old town" centers, including some warranting inclusion on UNESCO's World Heritage list. Here you'll find the expected combination of ancient (or skillfully renovated) buildings and narrow, cobbled streets. And next door, you'll find bustling business centers, cultural activities and modern hotels.

Budapest and Prague were the first two former Iron Curtain capitals to open up to Western visitors. In fact, Budapest was fairly open even before the end of the Cold War. After the fall, both cities became immediate magnets for American visitors. Prague, especially, attracted an inrush of young Americans, many with entrepreneurial ambitions in what they saw as a land of wide-open opportunities. Both have remained on many writers' "hot" lists for several years, and with good reason.

Krakow, Poland's historic onetime capital - and also on Priceline's list - eclipses Warsaw as the place to visit in Poland. It's one of Europe's architectural gems, but it also offers the usual mix of good food, entertainment and history.

Priceline's final two nominees are Baltic capitals. A few years ago, newly emerging Prague was a "new Vienna"; now Vilnius, Lithuania, is hailed as the "new Prague." And Tallinn, Estonia, is among the latest Eastern cities to be "discovered" by American travelers and travel writers. Both are on lots of "hot" lists. Both offer a wonderful mix of food, nightlife and culture. However, compared with Budapest and Prague, you're likely to find fewer English speakers among the locals, so be patient.

Priceline cites three-star hotel rates in these five cities starting as low as $100 per night, double, including VAT and service and usually breakfast. These rates are based on postings on Priceline.com and on its two European affiliates, Priceline.co.uk and Book- ings.com. When I tested a sample trip in mid-September, however, the best rates I found were a bit higher. But you can still find lots of three-star hotels and even some at four-star city-center locations with rates starting at around $125 a night.

As to possibilities that Priceline didn't cover, I suppose the real question is, "What will be the new Vilnius?" Riga? Bucharest? Sofia? Sorry, but I don't have an answer. I've heard good reports on Ljubljana and Zagreb. Dubrovnik is back in business, but other centers in devastated former Yugoslavia may have to wait a bit longer, and I wouldn't hold my breath for Kiev or Minsk. Still, relatively adventurous travelers can find lots of relatively undiscovered spots in the East.

As in Western Europe, you can usually beat the city-center prices:

-- Staying in outlying areas or the suburbs is OK for rock-bottom prices, but it means more time than you want to spend schlepping back and forth between hotel and visitor centers on public transportation.

-- Staying in two- and even one-star hotels is generally fine through most of Western Europe. But I haven't been to many of the emergent Eastern centers, so I'm not sure how comfortable some Americans would be in down-market hotels in Tallinn, Vilnius and other such destinations.

-- You can also almost always cut costs substantially by sticking to the countryside rather than cities, but, again, I suspect that isn't as good an idea in the East as in the West.

E-mail syndicated columnist Ed Perkins at eperkins@mind.net. To comment, go to sfgate.com/travel.