A huge disaster. We bought a tickets with relatively comfortable connection of an hour and 45 minutes. The airline changed the time of the flight to 30 minutes later, so we were left with a connection of 40 minutes. My father who was flying with me is 85 years old. I called the airline in Italy saying that my father is 85 and asking to be changed to an earlier flight from Palermo or a later flight from Rome. Both flights exist, but the airline wanted to charge me for the change. They told me to try through Travelocity, the site through which we bought the tickets. Travelocity wrote an e-mail to the airline explaining the special circumstances, but the airline refused again. The day of the flight we explained the situation to the agent at the check in counter; she said the only thing she could do to help was give us both boarding passes and requested special assistance to be able to change flights faster. We asked to be placed in seats closer to the exit, she refused. She did not know the gate for the second flight. When we got to the plane, we told one of the flight assistants and she just said they would wait for us and the flight was on time. The flight was delayed 40 minutes: exactly the time we had for our connection. When we landed, the flight assistant asked for the people who had asked for special assistance to stay seated until everybody had disembarked. Of course, we could not wait. We ran to find out on a monitor our gate, because no one helped us, although we asked for help to several ITA employees. When we got to the gate no one was there; we thought it had left because I got to the door to check if it was closed. Suddenly, a very grumpy ITA employee did not ask if we needed help and just started to scream at us why we were at the door. I explained and she did not say that the flight was delayed, she just continued scolding. After a while she said the flight was delayed. Then she called us from the counter and asked why we had requested special assistance “because this assistance is only for people who cannot move”. I explained we asked for assistance to change flights faster because the connection was tight; not because we cannot move, and that we did not wait for it because it did not make sense that we had to hurry, but we had to wait until all passengers disembark. We will never fly with ITA Airways again. We travel a lot and I had never encounter such a disorganized airline. Actually, it is the first time I take te time to write a bad review of an airline. The worts.
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