Travel Technology - wifi options for europe trip

I am weighing options for dealing with wifi access while travelling in europe this fall. I have an iphone (Verizon plan but unlocked) and an ipad and will be in Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany over about 45 days.

I had planned to take the $25 per 100 MB option from Verizon and then get a local SIM once I had arrived in a new country where I would be for more than a few days. The countries where I will be for at least two weeks each are Spain, Italy and Germany. I already purchased a spain SIM card so I have that country covered with a GB or so unlimited data.

Will I be able to use the personal hotspot option on my iphone to broadcast the wifi connection from the iphone to the ipad?

The other option I am considering is a mifi from TEP. I used the TEP mifi with pretty good success last year for a month in Italy. So I am familiar with their service. But they are just so expensive, for my trip it would be close to $200 for the device and 3 GB service. But it would save me from buying the SIM cards.

Any advice on this situation would be appreciated. Thanks!

This is a problem I ran into also, if you go the sim route you most likely need to get a sim card for each country.

At least you are staying two weeks in a few those countries you can get a sim card from local carriers prepaid with data on there. Hopefully others can give you suggestions for each countries. I do wonder if there is a database out there for each country or some Europe plan that would make it easier but I haven't found an easy way out myself yet.

May want to check out this thread for some suggestions: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/1325807-prepaid-data-europe.html

Italy: I've got a TIM card that works exceedingly well in an unlocked phone & an unlocked MiFi. You can turn data on/off, and set up in various increments. There's a bit of a dance you have to do with a CF to get started in the first place - but if you ever plan to go back you can keep the account active by getting cheap recharge cards over there (bring a couple back) and add them to the account via text/internet.