Originally Posted by
bdemaria
On more than one occasion at FCO, I've had to get off the plane when it has been parked away from the terminal and take a shuttle. There are a ltd # of gates and if the AA flight arrives early OR the departing plane at the gate is delayed, then indeed they may have pax deplane quite a distance from the actual terminal via stairs and take buses to passport control.
It doesn't happen regularly, but it does happen.
Originally Posted by
ejs621
It has happened on my last 5 flights into FCO over the last year. Two flights from ORD and 3 from JFK.
Cheers!
I guess I've been lucky. I apologize
ejs621 for my rude tone.
I had assumed since all my flights deplanned at the gate that this was the norm - that and I've never read these reports here before. Now I know better, thanks.
To the OP:
Originally Posted by
ontheway
I am very grateful for all the info. I kept checking and I was able to get jfk/fco for 60K and fco/jfk for 30K. I have these on hold for the 90K with the hope that before I have to actually confirm them,
the 60K going may drop to 30K. In any case I feel lucky that I was able to get the seats.
Can anyone tell me what the AA flights to FCO are like? Are the seats comfortable? Decent service? Thank you again and just to let you know, I am a she
In the past AA would initially load a certain amount of seats and when these are gone, they're gone. Later AA might be loading in more in some indiscernible pattern but the notion that the 60k seats you now see will "drop to 30K" isn't likely. What
could happen though is someone might have put these seats on hold. If they didn't want them the seats could reappear after the 5 day hold expired. But of course, with recent AA changes - nothing is guaranteed or reliably predictable.
You're currently holding tix costing 90K a piece to fly in coach. I think this is nuts. For 10k more you could fly roundtrip in Business class or for 10k less you could fly there in Business class and back in Coach. Have you called AA to check on partner availabililty, specifically for availability on IB JFK-MAD-FCO?
For
10k less you could keep your return FCO-JFK on AA using 30k and
fly in Business for the outbound on IB JFK-MAD-FCO for 50k, if availabile. This might make alot of sense since it's at the beginning of the trip, and for the overnight TATL that you'd want the most comfortable set up. Yes you're adding more overall travel time but you'd stand a far better chance of getting sleep, you'd be able to use the great lounges at MAD for your arrival lounge and then just a quick 2.5 hr flight on to FCO.
Or... if you only want to spend
60k per tix, right now I see available on AA.com 2 seats for its JFK-MAD, flight 94 for 30k each on May 31. You'd then fly on IB to FCO but in this case you wouldn't have lounge access (unless you have AA/OW status).
Edited to add:
For this last option you could also fly in coach on IB's plane. If both carriers have available coach inventory you may want to consider this thread from the Iberia forum comparing the JFK-MAD flights on AA's 757 with IB's Airbus:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/iberi...n-jfk-mad.html