Rome, Italy — New flights, scenic tourist trains and upcoming border checks redefine autumn travel across the country.

ROME — Italy’s shoulder-season travelers can expect a flurry of changes this autumn, from fresh air links and nostalgia-rich railway journeys to a calendar of transport strikes and a looming biometric border system. Here is what to know before you pack for Rome, Milan, Naples or beyond.

New flights widen Italy’s horizons

Italy’s main gateways are adding point-to-point service just in time for cooler weather and smaller crowds.

Rome, Italy — Italian watchdog says hotel passport scans stolen; what travelers can do to protect data.

ROME — A warning from Italy’s data-protection regulator has travelers worldwide rethinking the age-old ritual of handing over a passport at hotel check-in. According to a recent advisory from the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, several hotel information-technology platforms were breached, exposing high-resolution scans of guests’ passports and national ID cards.

Rome, Italy — Travelers weighing an Italian beach holiday face sun-lounger rental fees that now top £292 a day in spots such as Alassio.

Italy’s private beach clubs—those neat rows of umbrellas and loungers you see from Liguria to Puglia—are posting another year of price rises. Altroconsumo’s 2025 audit of 213 lidos across ten destinations found average prices for one umbrella and two loungers up about 5% versus last summer and roughly 17% higher than in 2021.

Athens, Greece — Crete, Naxos and other Greek islands see triple-digit U.S. search spikes for 2025 vacations, HomeToGo data show.

A fresh set of numbers from vacation-rental marketplace HomeToGo points to a banner year ahead for Greek tourism, and Athens officials can hardly hide their excitement. The platform’s annual travel-trends report shows that search interest from U.S. users for Greece vacations in 2025 has rocketed so sharply that the country now ranks No.

Palermo, Italy welcomes the NH Collection Palermo Palazzo Sitano, a boutique hotel melding Baroque heritage with modern comforts in the city’s historic center. In a city where Arab-Norman arches share the skyline with Baroque cupolas, travelers will now find a fresh hideaway behind the stone façades of Via Vittorio Emanuele.

Rome, Italy — A new autonomous ChatGPT agent can scan online travel agencies in seconds and lock down a Rome hotel room without a single click from you.

ROME — Booking a hotel in the Eternal City has always meant toggling through tabs, battling pop-ups and second-guessing neighborhood names. That ritual may be fading. A recently released autonomous version of ChatGPT has proved it can translate a vague request—“find me a place to stay in Rome”—into a confirmed reservation in just minutes, according to a commentary published on industry site Hospitality Net.

Rome, Italy — Travelers face possible flight disruptions on July 26 as airport ground staff and airline employees plan a nationwide four-hour strike.

ROME, Italy — The height of the European summer getaway could be jolted next week when thousands of aviation workers across Italy walk off the job for part of the afternoon. The coordinated industrial action, scheduled for July 26, is expected to touch virtually every corner of Italy’s air-travel network and may ripple out to airports far beyond Rome and Milan.

Florence, Italy tops Travel + Leisure’s 2025 rankings, leading European cities such as Rome, Siena, Seville, Granada and Istanbul.

FLORENCE, Italy — Travelers looking ahead to 2025 have crowned the Tuscan capital their favorite European city, according to the latest Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards. Florence not only outshone every other city on the continent but also secured the No. 11 position worldwide, outranking dozens of urban heavyweights from Paris to Prague.

Rome travelers face potential disruptions on July 26 as Italian airport and Volotea staff plan strikes; what holidaymakers need to know about delays, rebooking and EU 261/2004 compensation.

ROME, Italy — Peak-season flyers bound for Rome and other Italian gateways could encounter schedule turmoil this weekend, as airport ground staff nationwide and crews at Spanish low-cost carrier Volotea prepare to walk out for four hours.

Rome, Athens and Florence are experiencing peak-season overtourism—here’s what savvy travelers can do to reclaim the Italian and Greek classics this summer.

ROME, Italy — A dream photo at the Trevi Fountain or a leisurely climb up to the Acropolis is starting to feel more like a contact sport than a cultural rite of passage.