Summer Airfare to Italy

Last summer my family of 4 flew Pdx-Athens, and then home Venice-Pdx. It was about $1300 each on IcelandAir for regular economy. It wasn't an ideal routing, we had two stops in Europe. The one stop routes were running $1600+ for regular economy. I don't book the basic fares.

What tour are you on that you are planning to fly into Rome and home from Venice?

Due to logistics of getting to VCE, especially early in the AM, most advise to fly into Venice and home from Rome

You can easily scope this out yourself on Google flights. The first thing you will see when the site comes up, in the upper left-hand corner of the box is "Round trip." Click the down arrow and select "Multi city," then proceed from there.

I’ve had no difficulty flying home from the Venice airport. If you have an early morning flight you can move to an airport hotel the night before. There are several very close to the airport with shuttle service.

When you say a transferable fare, do you mean cancellable? Because you really need to consider doing that these days.

And realize that it's quite likely your airline will at least change your flight, if not cancel it themselves. That is also the state of travel these days.

Google should have the ability to pull up historical fares on the route of your choice, or start tracking your itinerary today and you'll get almost daily alerts of fare fluctuations, because yes that too is how airlines work these days.

I have flown Delta a lot on that route in the opposite direction, heading to Venice, first. But, I fly Economy Comfort, so those aren’t the least expensive. (Now I have to fly Spokane to SeaTac to begin your route.)

Usually you get the options to route through JFK, Atlanta, Amsterdam or Paris. My preference is definitely Amsterdam.

Agree with others to set up Google flights for their route to have it send updates, informing you of prices. I recently had one fluctuate $500, heading to Spain.

You have a lot of time to research flight prices. Google Flights is a great tool to track price history- you can see yourself what flights cost last summer. That may or may not be related to what flights cost next summer.
The calendar on Google Flights allows you to check prices for the entire month, as often changing your trip by one day can result is substantial savings.
Set up price alert notifications.
Sometimes multicity alerts are hard to set up, if so, set the Alert for round trip Venice and/or Rome, as usually the prices are in the same range. Also consider Milan as a possible airport.

Good luck.

Which RS tour will you be on? Are there actually 8 of you?

Answers to these questions will definitely affect your lodging outside the tour and where it might be most convenient to arrive in and depart from Italy.

I traveled solo on the Village Italy tour in the summer of 2017. I flew multi-city into Rome (FCO) and home from Milan (MXP). I joined the tour in Padua after 6 nights in Rome, 2 in Ravenna and 5 in Venice. It's a very short train ride from Venice to Padua. We were transferred to the Milan central train station after the tour ended and some of us spent a few nights there before flying home from Milan.

I've never flown into or out of Venice. People on the forum often talk about how you have to get to the airport at 0:dark:30 for flight(s) home from there. I can't imagine herding 8 (plus?) people at that time of day.

Google Flights will help you sort all this out, complete with costs.

Cancelations are no worse now than pre pandemic. This article has good advice

https://pirg.org/articles/flight-delays-and-cancellations-what-to-know-before-2023-holiday-travel/

Flying home from Venice may or may not require waking up in the middle of the night; it depends on where your home is. It's easy to look at options on Google Flights to see whether it will be a problem for you. It wasn't an issue for me in September 2022 as I head back to Washington-Dulles.