Flying away

For the trip we just recently took to Italy, we flew into Rome on Air France via Charles de Gaulle airport and out of Florence.  There are no direct flights to Italy from South Africa, so it was a case of a connecting flight and the question was via where…

I usually check which flights are the best prices on www.travelstart.co.za and then check the most competitive prices on the airlines own websites as well before deciding on a plan. We learned the hard way that it's better to do an open jaw flight when we went to France and our train took double the time to get back to Paris than it was meant to and we ended up having to pay for another flight to get home! And extra taxi ride, extra night in a hotel with lots of stress... In the end we had a special evening, but I wouldn't like to repeat that experience!  Air France’s website allowed us to do the open jaw flight effortlessly on their website for not much difference in the ticket price.

One nice thing with Air France was that we could pre-book seats on the international leg of our flights.  We booked seats on the upper deck, and were seated in two seats next to each other. We were also able to pay a little extra to book exit row seats, which meant we had lots of space.  I always seem to find people in front of me who are quite happy to recline their seats as far back as possible which makes me really grumpy, so this was a bonus! There are only a few rows of economy class on the upper deck, which meant the flight was nice and quiet too. Helped along by a little sleeping tablet too!

We left quite a big time gap between the connecting flights... Just in case! In the end, all the flights we took were running on schedule but it would have been stressful if any one of them had been delayed. And we had a few hours to kill time in Charles de Gaulle both ways.

We mostly read on our iPads, walked around a little, checked out the shops that were either the equivalent of a not very exciting news agents or totally high end boutique. The eating places at the different terminals ranged from small and dingy to quite nice but expensive.  I was glad that I had a good audiobook loaded on my iPod and tried to zone out.  The airport offered 15 minutes of free wifi per device that allowed me to quickly check email and let everyone home where we were. You could extend the wifi at a reasonable cost, but I didn't think it was necessary. 

Having flown enough international flights to know which I liked and didn't like, this was one provider and route I would gladly do again.