Summer 2012 Italy Flights

I priced flights SFO to Venice for next August. Then I priced a flight to London; it was much less. My approach is to fly to London, then the next day move on to Paris or wherever. I always fly United because of my FF plan. I'm learning to look for United's partners like Continental and Lufthansa. You might try looking for flights to Rome. No doubt you will have to connect to a second flight somewhere. If on United Airlines, either Chicago or D.C. (maybe). The advantage of just buying two tickets is that you can stay overnight in London, then get to the next flight or train the second day. If you have lots of energy you may not need to do this. I'm older and have less stamina.

Try checking Aer Lingus flights from either Chicago (limited direct connections to continental Europe) or New York JFK (extensive direct connections to many cities in Europe including several in Italy - great for open jaw combinations). You then have to look for a cheap domestic flight from California to catch the Aer Lingus flights. We just snagged flights for a trip to Italy that included JFK to Venice then return flight Paris to Chicago mid June to mid July for just under $800 pp. We'll have to add a flight to JFK for about $160 and a flight from Chicago home for about $100. But that's still just $1060 round trip. In general, people should think outside the box a little and not just assume that the overseas flight has to start/end near their home or start/end at their tourism destination. With cheap domestic flights possible here in the US and very cheap flights within Europe as well as some good train deals, it just isn't wise to make those assumptions when doing the basic Internet searches for flights.

As a side note, please remember this rule, which I learned the hard way. Whenever you book "separate" tickets to a final destination, neither airline will protect you in the event that something goes wrong with an earlier "leg" of your flight. If you are going to buy separate tickets, allow an overnight in the connecting city and buy insurance. Mechanical issues, weather, strikes etc can foul up thousands of dollars worth of airline tickets.

Marianne has a good point. In our case, we will briefly visit friends in NYC before our Aer Lingus flight the next day. Upon our return through Chicago, it's much less of a risk - the trip being over by then - and there are multiple ways for us to get the final 330 miles home. But if you do try a connection on the same day, make sure your layover time is generous (at least three hours & preferably more) and do a little research into what your alternatives would be if the worst happened and you were significantly delayed. That said, despite many valid complaints about airlines and punctuality, I'm sure something like 98% of all flights arrive within two hours of their scheduled time.

If you are connecting through JFK, allow 4 hours. We had a 2:45 hour layover planned and thought it was good enough but because Delta had mechanical issues, our flight would not have gotten to JFK in time to get the Alitalia flight to Milan. Because the tickets were purchased separately, we weren't protected and we had to buy one way tickets on JetBlue (the only flight leaving PIT that would get us there in time) $450 bucks, down the drain. Had we allowed for a longer layover, we would have been ok. Lesson learned and I hope this saves even ONE person from the same, bad experience.

reserved my june tickets to italy in march last year for a very reasonable price...pretty sure your cheapest option here would be to book a round trip to rome and then connect rome (or another european hub city) & naples with a cheapo airline (i.e. easyjet, windjet, etc.), both ways if you want. for some reason, major us and european carriers love to jack up prices to smaller cities (i.e. naples, pisa, florence). this could lead to problems if you're unlucky with delays though, and if you're checking more than one bag, forget the "cheap" in "cheapo". connecting rome and naples by train is easy if your flight lands in rome; just pray your journey isnn't on a strike day (about a 2-3% chance). it's all about balancing the price of that major-carrier plane segment to naples vs. the price and risk associated with a cheapo airline/train ride. (major carriers are equally as likely to have delays as cheapo airlines, but obviously you won't have to pay to rebook if the two segments are on the same reservation).

Thanks everyone for the feedback !!!