It's almost impossible to find out whether a Malpensa - Milano train is 30 min late as they run every 15 minutes anyway..

Yes, of course. I was talking about trains in general. Mine have always left on time. Just lucky, I guess!

I don't understand this. We've flown in and out of Milan numerous times without problems. When I think of horrendous airports, JFK, Heathrow, and De Gaulle leap to mind, but Malpensa wouldn't have occurred to me at all.

I live in Italy, and travel frequently by train. Whenever we travel to a city more than about 100 km from where we live, we prefer to travel by train rather than driving. We take the train even to closer cities, if traffic and parking at the destination are problematic. If the trains were very unreliable, we would certainly prefer to drive.

The last train trip we took was of about 200 km, and the train was a very long-distance train, with many possibilities of delay before it arrived at our station. It also was not one of the high-speed Frecciarossa trains which always get favourable treatment when there are problems. The train arrived perfectly on time, and before it arrived at destination, it was running ahead of schedule and had to make several longer stops at stations in order to respect the schedule. This is not the first time we've experienced this.

Yes, of course. I was talking about trains in general.

As was I. And as I mentioned upthread, your milage may vary. Just because it's never happened to you, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Several trains we took in Italy this past winter were late, and this created issues with our connecting transport. This happened so often that we were surprised if a train was on time.

In one case the train died and we had to wait an hour for the next train, stuff happens. And this was all independent of a train strike that also happened during our stay.

I have no experience with the trains to the airport from Milan, but we've had less than impressive train/bus service in Italy in general. Bad luck? Maybe.

I'm glad to hear others haven't had this experience.

I'm not going to say nothing ever goes wrong but it's the exception not the rule.

A week or two ago someone was hit by a train outside of Bologna. That caused problems. I remember before Covid a power transformer blowing up near Florence and that caused problems.

But people need to put things into perspective. Italo the smaller of the two train companies has I think about 400 seats per train. They have many trains heading around the country. That's thousands of people every day. TrenItalia is much larger. If 1% of the people have an issue that's A LOT of complaints. It's still 1%.

@ Traveler_Nick: Your posts # 18 and # 26 give the kind of information that I, at least, find very reassuring. Thank you!

Meanwhile, we don't know any more about the OP's thinking than we did at the start of the thread....

Regarding my original question: Which of these starting cities (Munich, Zurich, or Geneva) offers the EASIEST train travel itinerary to reach an Italian city for rental car pickup, considering these potential routes?

• Munich -> Bolzano -> Lake Como
• Zurich -> Lucerne -> Lugano -> Lake Como
• Geneva -> Chamonix (by bus) -> Domodossola -> Lake Como

....Thank you for your responses. The reason we were considering these different starting locations is because we had a few days to kill before we started our Italy trip in Lake Como - and we wanted to have a rental car while at Lake Como to continue the rest of our trip in Italy. Hubby wanted to go to Munich, and I wanted to go to Annecy (we decided to nix Chamonix). We ended up flying into Geneva, taking a bus to Annecy and staying a few days, and then taking a train to Milan where we picked up our rental car and drove to Lake Como. (The flying into Zurich option was going to potentially fulfill our desire to see some beautiful scenery on our way to Lake Como, but we didn't do that. We will save that for another day. I hear that the train ride in Switzerland is beautiful.)