ITA Launches New Route: Rome-Chicago A330/A330-900Neo

Intro

Chicago is now serving the most Italian daily frequencies it has ever served with the addition of ITA's new route from Rome to Chicago. Flights are due to begin tomorrow, with the inaugural flight being from Rome to Chicago on the 11th of April.

Let's get into it!

The Route

The following schedule is the route that is intended to operate with the flight numbers. During the summer season, this route is scheduled at 6- 7 times per week, but as it stands, after November, no direct flights are loaded into the system. Huh🤨.

Rome (FCO) 9:20 am- Chicago (ORD) 13:10 pm AZ628

Chicago (ORD) 15:00 pm- Rome (FCO) 7:30 am AZ629

The plane operating this route through the end of September will be the A330.

A striking livery on the A330 if I do say so myself

I recently got the chance to try the business class out and found it to be a decent soft product but an okay hard product. ITA still has the barebones of Alitalia on board for their hard product🥴 on their A330. In my opinion, pick seat 5J, there is a crew rest curtain you can use😂.

Lie flat which is good but some room for improvement

Side note: Their new A321neo is a stellar hard product. If you get the opportunity, I cannot recommend this plane enough!

ITA Business Class A321neo

However, it's not all bad news, as in the month of October, the schedule has the newer A330-900neo loaded into the schedule! This represents a big upgrade in terms of hard product offerings.

Credit to OMAAT as I have not flown this product yet

Best Ways To Book?

If you haven't checked out my premium fare deals yet, you might want to as I cover ITA on some of them!

Roundtrip tickets start at 696$ in economy round trip and can go upwards of 1000$.

Not bad at all

The cheapest I am seeing for Business Class sits right around 3100$ roundtrip, one-way pricing is absurd.

Not bad for nonstop honestly, have seen worse

However, the best fares come out of Cairo as always. For 1300$ one-way or 1800$ roundtrip you can experience the A321neo product I mentioned above, the lounge, and the A330 over to Chicago. What a deal!

This is more like it

ITA is bookable through points programs such as Virgin Atlantic. However, for 1800$ roundtrip, the best value doesn't come on points. The points cost for the ITA Business Class one way from Rome sits around 85K transatlantic which would cause a roundtrip to be 170K points. Yikes! Even the travel portal could do you better than that!

Final Thoughts

ITA has just launched its newest route from Rome to Chicago with the inaugural set to take place on April 11th. This route is slated to be operated by the dated A330 until September and then replaced by the A330-900neo for now. There are some attractive business class fares if you are willing to make a trip down to Cairo with the cost coming out to 1800$ in Business Class roundtrip. Tick off the Pyramids, it's a blast, trust me😉.