jsl1998

I have a 10:00 a.m. flight from BCN to JFK on a weekday in mid-October. I will be connecting from Palma in Mallorca. I have a choice of a 6:30 flight on Norwegian Air which gives me a 2.5 hour connection, or a 7:00 flight on Vueling which gives me a 2 hour connection. Any suggestions as to which one I should take? Here in the US Norwegian Air does not have the best reputation for timeliness and I am concerned that even though it is an earlier flight if it is routinely delayed it might not be the best choice. Thanks in advance.

Ldnn1

Will you have baggage to check in? It makes a big difference to the riskiness of your - unprotected - connection.

Koby

Assuming for a moment that you do not have luggage check…
(With luggage – with delivery times up to one hour at BCN at times – this is near impossible; but even without checked luggage the correct answer is of course: “fly to BCN the day before”, unless you are on a flexible ticket to JFK.)

Over here, it is Vueling that has the bad reputation when it comes to delays, but the morning flights are indeed generally OK. (Have you checked the on-time performance for these on Flightstats?) And since Norwegian also has the earliest flight, it seems logical to choose them. But…

Norwegian uses terminal 2 at BCN. I am guessing that you are flying from T1 (since I don’t know of any JFK flights from T2), so using Vueling would put you at the right terminal on arrival. (There are no airside inter-terminal transfers at BCN.)

The transfer itself is easy walk from the gate to the central area of the shopping mall (sorry, terminal), up the escalators, passport control (which can take a bit longer than usual since April), go to gate. (Some US flights leave from a separate area at the end of the B gates, so no need to walk to the central area, but the process is the same of course).

And if you really want to choose the airline with the best on-time performance… ;-) Ryanair also has a 6:30am flight from PMI to BCN, but they use terminal 2 as well.

jsl1998

Thank you for the helpful information. Yes we will have checked luggage. Our flight to the US is in business class on AA but I assume that will not have any impact on when we will be able to retrieve our luggage from the PMI to BCN flight.

jsl1998

Just noticed that Air Europa has a flight the same time as the Vueling flight. It has a perfect Flightstats rating and also seems to arrive at T1.

Ldnn1

In that case you should definitely fly to BCN the night before. It is not worth missing your long-haul J flight.

The other option is to amend your ticket so that it starts in PMI as a through ticket. AA interlines with VY and sells this routing on revenue fares. However I'm guessing you're on an AA award ticket and unfortunately it's not possible to get VY flights on AA awards, and I doubt VY would check through on separate tickets. As such, you should fly the night before.