Most of you will leave from SLC on Saturday morning. You'll probably change planes in either Chicago or Atlanta and land in Düsseldorf on Sunday morning. Usually students arrive fairly early: 7:30 or 8:30. We can't check into Grend until about noon, so there's no point in rushing things. I will come to the airport around 9:30 and collect everyone. Then we'll travel together to Steele. We'll leave for Essen-Steele at or about 10:30 am. I'll give you a lot more detail about this topic later, but this is what you need to know to make a selection for your flight.
You are not required to follow this plan. Some of you may decide to make other travel plans. If you wanted to leave a week early and spend time in England, for example, you may wind up on a very different schedule. But if you land in Düsseldorf before about 10 am on Sunday morning, I'll collect you and cover all of your local transportation costs to Steele.
Now, take a look at the map below:
You can see that there are many other possible airports that are reasonably close by. What if you wanted to arrive at an airport other than DUS? Can you do that? The answer is yes, if you plan for it and are ready for some adventure. One possibility would be to fly into the Dortmund airport: DTM. I've been out there and it's a hub airport for EasyJet. Travel to and from the Dortmund airport isn't as easy as Düsseldorf, but if you're going to save $200, $300 or $400, maybe you're ready for a little difficulty. I recommend avoiding the Weeze airport: NRN (so called because it used to be named the Niederrein Airport.) It's even further out and very hard to reach by public transit. Airfare websites will sometimes refer to Weeze as "the other" Düsseldorf airport. It's very misleading. Weeze is not near Düsseldorf. Don't be fooled.
But you might look at fares to Köln/Bonn or some of the other possibilities. If you can save enough money to cover the train ticket you'll have to buy, it might be a good idea. Also, if you are spending a week in London or another European city before our program begins, you can probably get a really cheap RyanAir or EasyJet flight to Germany and they usually fly into the smaller airports.
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| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_Airport |
Begin to explore schedules and flights now. If you learn of particularly good opportunities, share them with others by way of the FB group. Now that the trip is fully enrolled, I'll put some pressure on the Study Abroad office to make final approval for the trip and allow us to move ahead with ticket purchase. If you have questions about air travel, please let me know. I'm not an expert, but I do have some experience.
