Best time for reserving Airfare on a Trip to venice Sept. 2022

No need to fly. The trains are way more convenient and less expensive.

Venice to Florence is about 2 hours. Florence to Rome is 1:40. Trains will save you a whole lot of time with no airport pre-flight time.

Enjoy Italy.

We usually start LOOKING at airfares about 8 months out, using a site like Google Flights or Kayak. Get a feel for prices, number of direct flights or those with minimum number of connections. Then around 6 months we get serious about booking, and will jump on a good price. But we ONLY BOOK directly with the airline. In pandemic times, it may be prudent to book a refundable fare, in case you need to cancel.

In your case, I would not book a round trip ticket, but would look at a multicity ticket into Venice and out of Rome. Much less travel time lost, and shouldn't be much more than a round trip in and out of Rome.

For travel between cities, the train is the way to go. Trenitalia and Italotreno are the 2 train companies in Italy that run the high speed trains. If you are unfamiliar with European trains, read up on them at man in seat 61 website.

Flights for those dates probably aren’t quite available yet. What you can do I start tracking prices and waiting for sales so you will recognize both the usual price and a good price.

It wasn’t until I read the first response that I realized you might have been asking a different question than I thought. Can you confirm which city pairs you want to know about flights for?

For your transatlantic flight I'd begin looking at options on a website like Google Flights at some point. Not necessarily right now, because things may change a lot over the next few months since travel is still ramping up very slowly at this point. Still, there's no harm in looking if you want to, to get an idea of whether you're likely to have decent connections and fares into Venice. You might also check Milan, just to be sure it's not way, way cheaper. On a recent trip to Spain I found a $500 savings (one-way) when I looked at flying to Madrid rather than Seville.

Use the multi-city (not round-trip) option so you can fly into Venice and out of Rome. When the time comes to buy your tickets, get them from the airline website, not a third-party like Expedia.

This travel environment is very different from periods when I ticket-shopped in the past, but what I usually do is identify the best few flights (from the standpoint of airport convenience and reasonable transfer times, if required) and make a note of the fares. I try to check the fares every day and keep a record of significant changes. The point of doing that is to know what is a typical fare so I recognize a screaming bargain if one comes along. I have seen fares bounce up and down by several hundred dollars based on some computer algorithm none of us understand. If you've been watching fares, you'll know not to buy if you see a crazy-high price. A lot of the fare websites, include Google flights, allow you to set up a fare alert on flights you're interested in; you'll then receive notifications of significant changes. However, I confess I don't rely just on those alerts because I'm not sure how timely they are. I do my own checking.

Be careful about the class of ticket you price. Most (maybe all) airlines are now offering a basic-economy category--though it may have a different name. That gets you on the plane, but you'll pay extra for many things or have to do without them. By the time you pay to pick a seat (if that's even allowed; sometimes it isn't), check a bag, take a full-carry-on-size bag on board, etc., it may well add up to more than a regular economy-class ticket.

There have been a great many schedule disruptions so far this year. Although I hope to head over to Europe in April or May, I am not planning to buy a ticket soon, because I don't want to be locked in to a particular airline that might start shifting its schedules around. I like generous but not excessively long transfer times, and there have been lots of reports of people who bought tickets for very reasonable connections that turned into unreasonable connections.

Any credit card points/miles ? Could you apply for a new card that has a 100,000 mile signup bonus? Advantage to a miles-based flight is that it may be more flexible in changes. Lucky for you that LAX has direct-to-Italy flights!

Acraven, we are going in May. When will you feel comfortable booking your flights?

Oh, Lulu, don't ask me that! My situation is unusual, because I fit my itinerary to the expected weather during the period I will be traveling rather than deciding I'm going to Place X no matter what. I've been sitting on my hands since early 2020, because I have no idea when I'll feel comfortable traveling, thus I have no idea where I will be flying to. In addition, I take very long trips that usually traverse at least 3 countries, which in these times requires a great deal of research on entry polices.

Actually, I hope to be heading over to Europe in late April or May myself, but without more certainty about my destination, I can't motivate myself to spend time on fare research. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking things out now. Before COVID struck I started my fare research in October.

For me, a lot would depend on the refund policies of the airlines I was considering. I'd rather not be in a position of knowing if the trip doesn't come off, I'll end up with a credit rather than a refund. I'd probably be willing to commit sooner if I lived somewhere with so few flight options that I pretty much was stuck with one airline. That way, I'd know I could use a credit later if I got stuck with one. But I am lucky to have international flights operated by a bunch of different airlines. If I found a good deal on flights to Barcelona (one place I might start my trip if I can travel in late April) and then couldn't get away until June (Scandinavia!), would I end up with an $800 credit from the Barcelona ticket on an airline that doesn't fly to Scandinavia?

Sorry not to be more help. There's really not an easy answer here, and a lot depends on your personal risk tolerance (for traveling during a murky period and for possibly losing money).