Hi again,
I’m starting a new post since this is a new topic. As I mentioned, we are putting together a very last minute trip to Greece and was wondering which airlines you would recommend flying with.
We can either fly out of San Francisco or meet up in New York at JFK and fly from there.
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
No airline flies nonstop from SFO. Delta flies nonstop from JFK and Emirates offers service from EWR.
Turkish Airlines flies nonstop from SFO to Istanbul. It's a short hop to Greece from there. Give them a look.
Thank you both. We will likely meet up and fly out of JFK
Currently Delta Airlines has nonstop flights operating between New York’s JFK and Athens, Greece airport ATH.
Thank you for that information too!
Do you usually book directly with the airline or do you use Kayak, Bookkng.com etc?
Most savvy travelers stick to this axiom:
ALWAYS book directly with the airline, NEVER book via some third party.
If (when) anything goes sideways, you want to deal directly with the company that's going to get you there, not with some third-party who can't really do anything, and often leaves you twisting in the wind.
Cannot understate this
Wow! Thank you for that incredible advice. You may have saved me a lot of headache and heartache!
Agree to book directly with airline, would add that we always have seat selected when we complete our reservation. No "get them at the airport," did that once or twice and we wound up in different parts of the plane.
Although I ultimately book through the airline, I will typically do research ahead of time using Google flights to see the varying options you can get. You can use a search filter by airline and your origin city. You can get a price matrix, too.
Once you see the different ways you can get in and out of Greece, and the prices, you can then book directly with the airline (Google Flights has an option "book with (e.g.) United" and you are redirected to the airline. I have checked to make sure the click from Google is not adding a fare increase. When I have replicated the flights on the UAL website, it is the same prices.
I will add to Marie's post regarding replicating the price directly via the airline site. Sometimes the Google Flights flight combo, which they link you to the airline site to buy the tickets, would not otherwise have been offered as an option from the airline site directly. Currently booked on a such combo.
Websites like Expedia, Orbitz or Skyscanner are super helpful to determine which airlines offer the best pricing and shortest flight durations, but once you find what you're looking for go to that airlines' website for booking.
In addition to the sites mentioned above -- google flights, skyscanner -- whenever I'm trying to figure out my flight options to/from anywhere, I find the following websites extremely useful (and fascinating -- CAUTION: it's very easy to get sucked into "exploring your options" on these sites and spend hours drilling down into flight details...consider yourself warned...)
Don't stay up all night...
Thank you all so much! This is definitely a learning experience.
I took American Airlines round trip from Detroit metro to Athens in October 2018. The one layover on each trip was in Philadelphia. At the time I bought the tickets, I wrongly believed that I should only fly on United States based airlines. I have since been persuaded that I don't have to just limit myself to USA-based airlines. I paid $1,486 US dollars. I might have seen a trip on Turkish airlines for about $900 to $1,000, with layovers in Dulles near Washington DC, and in Istanbul. I am unsure whether this would have been worth it. Look at the cost versus the total trip duration versus whether the amount of time to change planes is adequate for each layover versus number of layovers.
Thanks Mike!
