Europe Travel: A Schengen Area Itinerary — 13 countries in 90 Days

Our objective is to provide readers with a sense of what can be seen within 90 days in Schengen Area Europe. It suits travelers who would like to get a broad brush look and feel of cities, townships and villages across multiple places in Europe.

This itinerary is field tested and realistic around time, money, transport and energy constraints.

Notes about the itinerary

• We did not cover Portugal, Southern France, Andorra, Spain and Morocco in this part of the trip.*
• This itinerary does not cover any areas in non-Schengen Area countries. We continuously travelled for the full 90 days of our 180 day allotment within the Schengen Area.
• We did not focus much of our travel on Italy as we’d been the previous couple of years.

Maximize your experience

Most travelers have limited time. The many obligations back home and restricted holiday schedules means that people want to get more out of their itineraries when they are on the road. Because of this, we’ve written a post about How to Structure Travel when Booking a Multi-City Trip to maximize your time.

Our pace

The only times we felt the pace was rushed were on travel days that turned out to be longer than anticipated.

We organized departure from one city by train, only to find out that we need to make a chance to a local, slower regional train halfway through the ride. Our expected three hour train journey turned into a seven hour haul. While you can never fully control the transport schedule, we were not panicked because we had plenty of time to see the next destination, even with this twist in the schedule.

We recommend traveling in the morning – you never quite know what can happen on travel days.

There’s no right answer for how long to spend in a place — it comes down to whether you want the highlight reel or a longer, deeper look

The locations listed below include cities, towns, villages and islands. Each is captivating for its own reasons.

Some places require a half-day of sightseeing to get an adequate sense and solid feel of the place. Other places like cities are places you could spend a lifetime and still not ever know beyond your own neighborhood.

Similarly, we often receive questions about how long to stay in a certain location before moving on to the next. The reality is, there’s no right answer — it very much depends on whether you’re looking to get a sense of a country’s cities and townships, or looking to get intensely acquainted with a particular place.

It’s really up to you.

Our itinerary

Any country names that are hyperlinked route to a more detailed itinerary in that country.