Preparing for Italy 2019

It seems to have become an annual trip to Italy, and September is a good time to go.  For booking the flights, I was looking at new credit card bonuses for British Airways and Iberia, where the Avios (points) can be transferred between the two programs.  Since we would avoid flying on BA awards, where the fees on award trips could make it pointless to consider it a free trip, I went ahead and got the Iberia card.

I set up the Iberia Avios account before getting the card, because it needed to be open a certain amount of time before points could be transferred.  When I was ready to transfer my orphan BA points, I ran into trouble online, called BA for help, when they asked for my date of birth I gave it and they said it was wrong, but then agreed to the transfer.  I looked at my Iberia profile and saw they had my date off by a year.  I hear bad things about Iberia customer service, but I learned that I could email a scan of my passport to correct the date, and it eventually got fixed.  When the BA site asks for my date of birth, it won't take the correct one or the one off by a year, so I'm locked out and will need to resolve it if I need to use their program in the future.

In the meantime, Norwegian Air announced non-stop flights between Boston and Rome.  I was thinking it would be nice to fly with them on their low one-way fare, and the other way on Iberia Avios.  Just as the service was announced, word was coming out of more financial woes for Norwegian, and questions of how long they would continue to operate.

Since we were ready to make the booking on getting the first credit card bonus in February, I thought we might as well book the whole trip on Iberia.  They offer a range of Avios + money options, which was what we would need to use.  What caught my eye was Premium Economy on Iberia's partner LEVEL from Boston to Barcelona, then Vueling from Barcelona to Rome.  The seat assignments would need to be arranged by phone to Iberia, which worried me because of their service reputation, but it went well with us getting row 1 on the transatlantic segments.  The Vueling assignments in regular seats eventually showed up on their own.  It's nice to be in seats better than regular Economy, and Margaret likes row 1; it's nice to have the slightly better seats on the long flights, although our expectations won't be too great.  The cost was around $600 per person, and another level of the credit card's opening bonus has posted for a future trip.

Now as we're getting ready to go, I learned that there are ground workers' strikes at Barcelona airport last weekend and the weekend we're flying.  As I post this, it appears that the strike has been cancelled.  Still, since Norwegian is still operating the flight to Rome, I can think about whether that option would have been preferable.

Margaret's sister Emily is to arrive a week later; she waited until later to book and got Norwegian's Oakland-Rome non-stop.  As our plan stands now, we'll have one night in Rome, pick up a rental car to get to Umbertide, and try to give some attention to our house.  In the middle of our time, we'll all have a few days in Rome, and later we'll go to Emily's timeshare in Soriano nel Cimino.  Then Margaret and I are to have a couple of final days in Rome.  Our return flight has a long layover in Barcelona, which should let us go into the city for lunch.

As this planning has been happening, I won a Slow Europe prize and selected a week on Hvar Island in Croatia.   We're thinking of it in conjunction with Italy next spring, so there's a lot to think about in how to make that work.