Since you must check your bag on this trip, I hope that the tales of peoples’ recent experience is reassuring. But just remember that anecdotal stories are pretty much irrelevant to your personal experience. The fact is that the chance of your checked bag being lost is very, very slim. And probably even slimmer these days, with fewer people flying, but by next year that will likely change.
You can reduce the chance of your bag being misdirected even further by following the advice in the last previous post——if you have a flight connection on the way to Rome, book flights that allow ample time between the two flights, in case your first flight is late departing. Some airlines and third-party vendors will sell you a flight to Europe with a connect time of 90 minutes or even less. That is not enough, in my view. I like to allow 2.5 to 3 hours between our 2 flights. Then we end up with extra time sitting around the second airport, but that’s OK.
And now here comes an anecdote—not within the last 6 months, but from May 2019, our most recent trip to Europe. We flew British Airways from Seattle to Barcelona, with a connection at London Heathrow. I booked flights with 2.5 hours between landing in London and taking off for Barcelona. But our departing flight was late, and the connect time was cut down to 35 minutes. Upon touchdown, as our 747 plane taxied to the gate, there was an announcement that passengers booked on the Barcelona flight (there were 16 of us in all) would be allowed to de-plane first, and escorted to the next gate (which was in a different terminal, so we had to transfer by bus). They had a dedicated shuttle bus waiting for us at the gate. I thought, “oh, that’s great—-but what about our checked luggage? At least we have 4 days in Barcelona so the bags can catch up with us.” But lo and behold, it was there on the carousel at baggage claim.
