Railjet is Austria's train - unlike the German Bahn, they offer 3 classes - regular, first class, and Premium class. I just booked Premium Class tickets on their website and the PDF ticket is all in German except "Premium Class" for the Klasse, ha ha.

Raileurope is a travel agent selling rail passes, if I recall correctly.

With UA, you can fly SFO > FRA > BUD and then PRA > FRA > SFO. It's easiest to book this on the phone with UA because they'll use LH partner for the Europe flights, and you can't book LH flights on UA's website. It's annoying as it costs $25/ticket extra, but when we did SFO > FRA > MUC, the FRA > MUC portion cost another $60 whereas LH site was more expensive.

Not sure about DL, as I'm a UA flyer.

Anyway you could use Railjet to go Budapest to Vienna, which means travelling from and to the central train station in both cities, and avoiding the airports. From Vienna to Prague, you can check skyscanner.net for low-cost Europe airline availability, or even use Railjet as well which may not be as expensive as one would fear.

There are some posts about Railjet in the Europe Rail Travel forum. But the railjet website:

http://www.oebb.at/pv/en/All_about_T...ljet/index.jsp

I had some struggles figuring out how to buy Premium Class Railjet ticket so complained about it on FT, then was lucky about it.

As for the riverboat (hydrofoil), I googled riverboat Danube Budapest Vienna, to get a general idea of schedule/tickets. It sounds like a lot of fun, but like a plane, there are baggage limitations. Prices are similar to Railjet, but with luggage it sounded a bit unfun. So any boat transport for us will not be with luggage This website isn't *the* official site, but it is a good start:

http://www.budapesthotels.com/touristguide/mahart.asp

Happy travels, and hope that your son is enjoying his own time in Budapest. 20 years from now he'll really realize how great that experience is, and hopefully he'll encourage his future children to do something similar!

Michael