travelnaia

We have a complicated itinerary and need help booking the air tickets.

We (husband/wife) plan a trip in April/May 2014 flying from San Francisco to Palermo, Sicily with a stopover in Rome for 2-3 days. After touring Sicily, we will fly from Catania to Torino (Turin) directly ( flight may make a required stop in Rome). We could also fly from Catania to Milan and rent a car and drive to Torino (Turin).

We would then fly from Torino (Turin) to Amsterdam ..... Amsterdam to Glasgow .....Heathrow to San Francisco.

I am not sure how to go about booking this air itinerary. Should I use a "low cost - flight
comparison site" - if so, how? ..... or ....book thru an airline? The fare comparison sites have too few point-to-point selections.

Any suggestions?
Thank you.

alanRow

Book the main flights (ie home-Rome & Heathrow to home) as a multi-city ticket then look at ALL airlines - not just the low costs - that fly intra-Europe.

You don't need to drive Milan-Turin as the train services are good and Glasgow-London is best done on train unless you mean flying Glasgow-Home via Heathrow in which case book home-Rome & Glasgow-home

Check the websites of the airports and places like skyscanner & kayak for costs. Neither of these websites allow booking but they will link through to the appropriate airline

sparkchaser

alanRow, Kayak does indeed allow booking.

OP, according to your post, this is your proposed itinerary:

SFO-ROM
ROM-PMO
CTA-TRN
TRN-AMS
AMS-GLA
LHR-SFO

Just for fun I entered these into kayak as a multi-city destination itinerary. I got a price of $6225 per person.

Now, if you break the trip into three separate bookings:

SFO-FCO
AMS-GLA
LHR-SFO

and

ROM-PMO
CTA-TRN

and

TRN-AMS

$1571 for the SFO-FCO-AMS-GLA-LHR-SFO portion and $721 for the ROM-PMO-CTA-TRN portion and $351 for the TRN-AMS portion. Those prices are person and the price may fluctuate a bit depending on your actual dates. That comes out to be $2643 per person which I am sure you'll agree is a much better price than $6225 per person.


So....my suggestion is to go to Kayak and play around with the multi-city option for a while and you should be able to get price lower than I got using random dates in April/May 2014.

sparkchaser

Grrrr. I forgot to remove my first sentence. I misread what alanRow had stated and wanted to delete it.

Curse you, no edit feature!

greg

I don't think there is any way out of doing a lot of lookups and combine tickets obtained from different sources. Comparative search engines can only do simple comparisons.
There are really many ways to look at this. The number of days you are staying at cities matter. If it is short, it can be computed as a layover as opposed to a stopover and it can cost less. If Rome does not have to be between SFO and PMO, you can also look at SFO-PMO, LHR-SFO as main flight , then fly CTA-Rome, stay in Rome, take ~4hr train to Torino, Fly TRN-AMS,AMS-GLA, train to LHR.
Are all these places actual destinations?
When I see this type of itinerary, I seriously look at rationalizing the routing.

sparkchaser

<i>I don't think there is any way out of doing a lot of lookups and combine tickets obtained from different sources.</i>

As written this is untrue so you must have been thinking something different than you typed.

kybourbon

Kayak doesn't book AFAIK. They redirect you to the airline website. I also don't find the prices Kayak pulls up to actually be there when you start the booking process.

How many weeks do you have for all this travel?

For budget flights within Europe - www.whichbudget.com

Also www.skyscanner.com but I don't find it shows all the budgets.

In Europe, they don't overcharge for one way flights like US airlines do so it's easier to mix airlines. You do have to be wary of check in times and luggage policies as they are very strict.

laurie_ann

See if the site www.momondo.com is any help. I believe it includes more smaller airlines in Europe than Kayak.

sparkchaser

I retracted my statement about kayak booking (I was thinking about hotels and rental cars).

I find kayak prices to be with +/-$5 of the booking site's price.

laurie_ann

Also, from a trip I am looking at for next spring that includes Italy, Greece and Germany I found that the legacy carriers had flight schedules all the way out for those dates but the budget carriers did not. (They appeared to be on a two month lag. For example flights were not yet showing for May but were for March.) So you might also look at what choices are now for the same days of week in earlier months.

sparkchaser

If you're buying your tickets far enough in advance, you might want to skip the budget carriers altogether. Legacy carriers might be competitively priced. It depends on what is more important: saving money or alliance loyalty.

To me, spending an extra $50-100 is worth it if means that I can stay within my FF alliance and get those miles and my free baggage allowances.

wanttogo

Like you, I found air schedules and booking to and from Sicily to be confusing and difficult. We went to and from Catania. Also,o look into the budget airlines. be aware,though, that they do not book far out.
I also had trouble booking Alitalia online. The airline twice refused my credit card attempt-then I
Found out that it was not really refused but just put in limbo. Fortunately, my credit card company called
Me to verify the charges that night.

One thing in Alitalia' s favor, though, is that they will transport you to Palermo for a return flight if
The Catania airport is closed due volcanic eruptions!

Sicily is worth all the confusion, though!