My college roommate and I are taking an Alumni tour next August for a week in Verona, and a few days in Venice.

She lives in Ohio, I live in South Florida. Looking for suggestions for travel from a NYC area airport (or other east coast sites) to Verona. Need to arrive August 30 next year.

I think I can find transport home from Venice, but any airline suggestions you have would be wonderful. Either direct flights or flights we can partially do together.

I wouldn't try to fly together. I think it would involve too much extra time to coordinate your arrivals, but you can certainly check.

Each of you should research flight connections from your "home" airports to Verona, Venice and Bologna. The trains to Verona from Bologna Centrale and/or Venice (Mestre) are fairly quick, but compare the overall journeys (flight, getting to train station, train ride) to the multi-flight journey from your home airport to Verona. Some of the layovers to reach Verona, even from New York, are pretty long although you may prefer the all-air travel to dealing with air+train. '

I agree with Jean - trying to fly across the Atlantic together will cause you more headaches than needed.
Wikipedia shows a list of airlines and cities that have direct flights to Verona airport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona...d_destinations

Of those listed, the only one I would use is Lufthansa / AirDolomiti. You could fly Lufthansa from Miami to Munich or Frankfurt, and on the same ticket use Lufthansa subsidiary Air Dolomiti into Verona. Look for flights on google flights, or directly at lufthasa.com

Ohio is another question. If your friend is close to Detroit, then Lufthansa to MUC or FRA, connecting to the same flight into Verona would be an option.

If your friend isn't close enough to drive to Detroit, they can do 2 stops through just about any US airport they want - Chicago,Newark, Washington DC. etc. and meet up with you in Europe.

When we visited Verona about 8-10 years ago, we took 2 flights from SFO to Milan Linate, then took a short taxi ride (20 mins) to Milan Centrale train station, then one of the short hourly trains to Verona. As I recall - it was a much easier trip than I had anticipated.

Stu Dudley