marathon

My husband and I are traveling for the first time to Italy and are looking for some advice on flights. We would like to fly out of Raleigh, NC and possibly a one way to Venice and then return out of Naples. We are shocked at the prices...$1000 is the minimum that we are seeing. Any suggestions for other cities to fly in or out of or roundtrip versus one way trip. We figured it would save a day over there if we booked to one way tickets.
Thanks for any advice.

Intrepid1

I am assuming you have looked at consolidator sites such as www.onetravel.com as well as aggregator sites such as www.mobissimo.com; www.itasoftware.com; www.kayak.com

Are you willing to fly out of Washington-Dulles where there is more competition? However, depending on the time of year I think the $1000 fare may be the norm.

tamjam

Look at flying into/out of larger cities like Rome and Milan. More flights, more competition, more demand, etc.

viking

I found United and Continental were offering distress sales on their web site that didn't show up in travelocity or whatever. In fact, they were tricky in showing high prices first, but if you used a switch for alternate date search they would show almost half the price for THE SAME DAY. And this only worked because other research showed some of the few days of the month that were underutilized - exhausting!

Furthermore, in my research Paris was by far the lowest discounted, Milan and Rome in the middle, and for some reason Naples had a huge premium even by the ultra discount airlines. You can usually take a discount airline like easyjet.com for hardly more than the price of breakfast for local connections, like Paris-Rome, Milan-Paris

In these days of high euro and oil, I somehow found about the cheapest flights in years, an unbelievably cheap cruise, and the best luck ever in booking affordable Italian hotels even during busy resort weekends. There must be a strike looming to spoil this good fortune; they are postponing a bunch of current strikes due to the Pope:
http://www.whatsoninrome.com/strikes.php

RuthMc

I know that US Air is beginning service from Philly to Venice in May and you might have luck getting a good fare on them from Charlotte. I think one of the problems is trying to return from Naples. I was looking into Naples and I don't think there's as much price competition. If you return from Rome, you might have better luck.

We went in 1998 and flew into Venice and out of Rome on Lufthansa/United for around $700 in September. Of course, prices today don't compare with 6 years ago.

liz302

My boyfriend and I were recently in a similar situation- we are near Pittsburgh, PA and wanted to begin our May vacation in Rome and end in Sicily. We saved a TON of money by buying a US Air round-trip ticket from Philadelphia to London (Gatwick), then taking Easyjet from Gatwick to Rome and Ryanair from Palermo to London Standstead (sp?). We were nervous about switching carriers, but the layover at Gatwick is 7 hours (should be plenty of time, even if our flight is late!) and we gave ourselves a one day stopover in London on the way back. The total price for ALL legs of the journey came out to $510/person- about $3-400 less than flying direct from Philly to Rome, and about 1/3 the price of flying from Pittsburgh! And we get a day in London now, too!

So, bottom line: if you don't mind switching to a European discount airline, you may be able to save a lot by flying into London or Paris. Since the discount airlines have great one-way fares, this also gives you the flexibility to arrive at and leave from different cities in Italy.