Croatia From Chicago

The fares change constantly so I would keep your options open and track fares for several months instead of focusing on specific through cities. Today Frankfurt may be cheaper and tomorrow it may be some other city. And it depends what Croatian city you're trying to fly into.

Air Canada Rouge, although owned by Air Canada, is not Air Canada. It is a budget airline with very tight seating. Check their planes on seatguru. I would not want to be shoehorned into their seats with below standard pitch for a transatlantic flight, and in fact friends of ours who never went to Europe before took a Viking River Cruise and let Viking get them the airfare. Outbound was Rouge, which they did then realize, and they reported being completely miserable.

Frankfurt through Lufthansa and Star Alliance should give you the necessary connections.

I would choose the cheapest non-stop flight into Europe and then work a separate ticket for the connection for Croatia. Just make sure you have PLENTY of connection time to do this and keep in mind if you book a budget airline to Croatia many leave different regional airports. For example, if you find a good flight into LHR - then take care to make sure you have a flight that leaves LHR and not London Gatwick (LGW) Stansted (STN) or Luton (LTN). But check out AMS (Amsterdam- Schiphol) - I have notice ORD-AMS has been very cheap lately (ORD being my local hub). But who knows what route will be the cheapest for your time frame. You just have to keep checking. There is an American Airline 9:00 am flight out of Chicago for LHR arriving at 10:45 pm this is ideal if you want to get a hotel for the night at Heathrow and then fly out to your European destination the next morning all refreshed. I have done this a couple of times to get places in Europe.

As you can see, there are different philosophies expressed in this thread. I'm with Agnes: I go to Google Flights, enter my origin and destination, and compare travel times and fares. I am not about to buy a roundtrip ticket to London or some other gateway and a separate ticket from there to my ultimate destination. I don't want to guess how many hours of buffer I need to build into the schedule, and I don't want to have financial concerns if my first flight runs late. Doing the separate-flight business for the return trip is even riskier, because you'll be out a lot of money if you miss the second (transatlantic) leg and have to buy a new ticket at the last minute.

Yes, I do agree with acraven that buying separate tickets has big risks. I have purchased tickets this way in the past to save a ton of money on tickets from the midwest on a family of four. But its not for the faint of heart. If you are only buying one or two tickets then a connect itinerary is the way to go and you can shop around to find the best deal.

Great advice! We just returned from Mallorca Spain. Booked our flight on British Air connecting in Heathrow. Scanned our boarding passes to get to our connecting flight and 2 of us got through, the other 2 had "timed out" and they WOULD not let us through! Adequate time between flights is required (our flight out of Boston was slightly delayed...).

From every city in EU (Paris, frankfurt, Budapest, London) you have direct fly to Zagreb. The easiest option is to use Skyscanner. One stop, pick your budget.. using Skyscanner you can rent a car. From airport drive to Ljubljana for a day. On the way back stay one night at Plitvice lakes, in morning see the lakes. And head to Split. Leave the car there. Take Krilo.hr catamaran and visit islands: Hvar and Korcula. Fly out from Dubrovnik. If you have extra time then stay in each place several days to get a local experience. Best