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2 hours 10 min to connect at FCO - enough time?

I've got flights to Puglia set up for September. Looking over additional options, I have the opportunity to cancel my original flight (which has a very long layover in FCO) and rebook a new flight that would save a bunch (on a different airline). My primary worry is that the cheaper flight has a connection in FCO that's 2 hours 10 minutes. It's been years since I went through FCO and don't recall the details.

My inbound flight would be on American Airlines. I'd be connecting to an ITA flight to Bari.
Will be arriving on a Tuesday in mid-September, just before noon. We WILL have checked bags.

My guess is that this should be "enough time to connect, barring any disasters, but not a lot of time to waste."

For those who know FCO better than me (that's most of you) is this a reasonably safe connection? What do you think?

Note: This should be on a single ticket all the way (I THINK...checking to confirm that now...it's not clear to me because I believe ITA is now part of Star Alliance, while American is in OneWorld...so I would not expect them to check bags through, yet I'm seeing info online, from a usually-reliable source, that insists American does have an Interline agreement with ITA, which should in theory indicate that they can do the bag transfer. Of course, it's Italy, and I know that sometimes things don't always work perfectly as one might hope...)

Posted by
109 posts

If it's on one booking, you should be fine. I would make sure there's an alternate itinerary later in the day in case your first flight is badly delayed.

If it's not on one booking, I would consider the train. The Frecciarossa is 4.5 hours from Termini and costs €61 if you buy at the station.

The confusion on ITA's alliance is probably because they only just got bought by Lufthansa, so they're still in the process of changing everything over.

Posted by
17450 posts

One big question......where did you buy the ticket? Some third party sellers make it seem that it's one ticket but it's actually two.

ITA has never been part of Oneworld but did have an interline agreement with American if all on one ticket. However, since its takeover by Lufthansa, I'm not sure if it still exists.

Posted by
534 posts

Could you look at Lufthansa flights that avoid FCO and connect in Germany?
We traveled from JFK to Catania via Munich a few months ago and it was good....not sure about Seattle, though.

I might look into that option from NY to Bari in a few months.

If same ticket, I'd take the chance through FCO.

Posted by
7133 posts

Thanks for offering your insights. I've decided NOT to switch flights, will be sticking with the flights I booked many months ago (the "cheaper" alternative I thought I had found turned out to be an illustion - and substantially more expensive than I had been led to believe). So I no longer have worries about a short layover in FCO - I'll be there for several hours, as I had originally planned (so I can be assured of making my onward connection between 2 separate tickets). Back to Plan A.

Thanks anyway!