Booking flights to Sicily

For an International flight, I start looking as soon as I know rough dates. I am just trying to get an idea of what to expect for cost. I do not get too excited about buying though until somewhere between 6 and 3 months to go.

It helps in my case that I travel enough that I know for my situation, anything under $1000 is a decent deal, so if I see that, I buy. Since on my airline changes are free, and cancelling gets me a credit for future use, the risk is low. I have booked, seen lower fares, rebooked the same dates, and taken a credit for my next trip a couple times.

For Sicily, your dilemma will be whether to just fly round trip to Rome, spending days at the beginning or end there, and then flying another airline to and from Sicily, or to try to book flights through to Sicily and back with one airline.

A question to think about now (as suggested in the previous reply) is whether you want to try to do it all in one shot or stop in Rome for a nite or more. Depending on where you live there it may take two stops to get to Palermo which makes for a long day. Furthermore you'd want to avoid any trips that aren't booked on a single ticket since if you miss the last leg to Sicily nobody is required to put you on another flight. But those may be the solutions with the best cost or departure times.

We flew to Rome, changed planes for Sicily and flew there, landing in Palermo. .Very easy.

I feel your anxiety, because I was going though the same thing. It is no secret that Italy for 2025 is the Jubilee and everything will tighten up very quickly, especially in Rome. I was too on edge and booked early. I went with a travel agent to book everything. This may sound strange, but my daughter and I chose to book TPA to JFK round trip. Then booked JFK to Istanbul round trip, next booked Istanbul to PMO and CTA to Istanbul. No matter what we decided getting to Sicily was going to give us a long flight and airport time in layovers. With this itinerary, the only long layover we have is after we land at the Istanbul airport on our way back. Therefore, I booked a skyside Yotel hotel for the night and ordered two to-go boxes for breakfast in the morning. We went with economy for everything except going from JFK to Istanbul and back (10 hours), and the rest broken down into one to two hour flights. The Istanbul airport is awesome! I always wanted to go to Istanbul. There are layover tours at the airport, and so many amenities that make this airport dreamy. Additionally, we are avoiding Rome, because of the congestion due to the jubilee which will guarantee delays and bumps. Plus, we were not gaining anything by going there except to see the crowed airport with no time to view Rome. I must admit it was a bit of a stretch to view this itinerary as a positive adventure at first, and I almost canceled. With the Turkish airline you can cancel free of charge within 24-hours of your booking with no penalty if this flight is coming from the US or going to the US and the flight you are canceling is at least seven days out. No visa needed unless you leave the airport, and if you need one you can apply at the airport; if you had not done one in advance. I am not saying I highly recommend this to everyone, but it was an option that worked out for us. My daughter stated she did not want to spend a log time in an airport! Any airport! We will have maximum time in Palermo before the tour begins and time to rest in between on our way back so jet-lag will should not be too much of an issue upon our return. I booked to leave on Thursday morning (to help avoid jet-lag), and we will be in Sicily by early Friday morning, tour will start on Sunday. We plan to leave CTA on Thanksgiving (7:00p) which is a day after tour ends. The RS hotel said they will happily hold luggage at desk, so we can explore Catania before leaving for our flight on the 27th, and arrive in Istanbul same night (2-hr flight). We then will spend the night (which will make my daughter extremely happy) and of course fly out in the morning to JFK and so on. I had booked extra rooms where I need to, because most RS hotels are small and only have so many rooms available. Once again, this is most likely very a unconventional itinerary, but it does work for us.