Paris or Rome: Rome Is Cheaper From 18 of 25 US Airports

Paris and Rome are the two cities Americans book most often on a first trip to Europe, and the fare difference between them is small enough that most guides call it a wash. Ours does not, because the national medians and the airport-by-airport picture point the same way and the margin is consistent.

Rome medians $669 and ranks 5th of the 40 European cities we price. Paris medians $690 and ranks 10th. Rome is the cheaper of the two from 18 of the 25 US gateways that priced both, and Paris from 7.

Across the 25 US gateways that priced both

Rome is cheaper from 18 of 25

On median the two are $690 and $669, which favors Rome. The two measures agree here, which makes the answer unusually safe to act on.

Paris

Median round trip

$690

Cheapest fare found

$459 from New York

Gateways where it is cheaper

7 of 25

Its strongest airport

Miami by $114

Rome

Median round trip

$669

Cheapest fare found

$461 from New York

Gateways where it is cheaper

18 of 25

Its strongest airport

Raleigh by $178

From	Paris	Rome	Cheaper by
New York	$459	$461	Paris by $2
Washington DC	$573	$528	Rome by $45
Boston	$558	$562	Paris by $4
Miami	$526	$640	Paris by $114
Chicago	$589	$598	Paris by $9
Nashville	$629	$578	Rome by $51
Orlando	$598	$628	Paris by $30
Los Angeles	$617	$616	Rome by $1
Denver	$649	$598	Rome by $51
Las Vegas	$670	$610	Rome by $60
Portland	$694	$604	Rome by $90
San Francisco	$674	$647	Rome by $27
Raleigh	$756	$578	Rome by $178
Seattle	$690	$700	Paris by $10
Tampa	$704	$701	Rome by $3
Houston	$710	$707	Rome by $3
Minneapolis	$726	$691	Rome by $35
Atlanta	$674	$759	Paris by $85
Charlotte	$732	$728	Rome by $4
Philadelphia	$754	$717	Rome by $37
Austin	$787	$724	Rome by $63
Dallas	$768	$750	Rome by $18
Detroit	$795	$750	Rome by $45
Salt Lake City	$795	$757	Rome by $38
Phoenix	$795	$792	Rome by $3

The exception is the Northeast, and it is a real one

The single cheapest fare in this comparison belongs to Paris: $459 from New York, just ahead of Rome's $461 from the same city. Both are remarkable numbers for major Western European capitals, and they exist for the same reason. New York sells more European airlines than any other US gateway, and Paris in particular draws six carriers flying it nonstop.

From Boston the two cities are four dollars apart, which is a tie by any honest reading, and from New York two dollars apart. Paris's widest win is Miami at $114, with Atlanta behind it at $85. Those seven airports are the whole of Paris's case; everywhere else Rome takes it, sometimes narrowly and sometimes, as at Raleigh, by $178.

That gives a clean rule. In the Northeast corridor, Miami, Atlanta and a couple of others, price Paris first. Everywhere else, start with Rome. And in all cases the margin at your own airport is larger than the twenty-one dollars separating the national medians, which is the recurring lesson of every comparison on this site: the average is not where you are standing.

Neither one is a nonstop bargain

Something both cities share, and it surprises people: on the routes into either city where a nonstop was on offer, the nonstop was almost never the cheapest fare.

For Paris the record is absolute. On every route into Paris in our carrier grid with a nonstop available, the cheapest ticket connected, and the premium for flying direct ran from about thirty dollars out of New York to nearly seven hundred out of Los Angeles. Six airlines fly Paris nonstop from the US and not one of them was cheapest on its own route.

Rome is the same shape with a slightly softer edge. The cheapest fares in are connections through Lisbon, Keflavik and Copenhagen, and the nonstops sit above them.

The practical consequence is that the Paris-versus-Rome question is downstream of a bigger one: whether you will take a connection at all. If you will, both cities get materially cheaper and the gap between them narrows. If you insist on a nonstop, you are paying a premium in both cases, and it is worth knowing the size of it from your airport before you decide which city it buys.

Both cities have more than one airport, and only one of them matters

Paris has three airports in our arrival data and Rome has two, and in both cases the transatlantic answer collapses to one.

Charles de Gaulle takes every Paris nonstop from the US. Orly is a short-haul and domestic airport, so a US itinerary into it is a connection through another European city and costs more for the privilege; Beauvais, the low-cost airport, had no US itinerary at all in the week we priced. Rome is the same story: Fiumicino carries the transatlantic traffic and Ciampino is a European low-cost field.

This matters because metro-code searching hides it. Search "Paris" or "Rome" on most flight sites and you get a metro code covering all of them, which can surface an itinerary into the secondary airport that looks cheap and involves an extra stop and an awkward transfer. Our arrival-airports analysis prices each airport individually for exactly this reason. For these two cities the rule is simple: land at Charles de Gaulle, land at Fiumicino, and treat anything else as a routing to inspect rather than a bargain.

Which is better value once you land

Outside our scope, and worth one honest sentence rather than a pretend answer. This site prices flights; it does not price a week in either city, and the ground costs in Paris and Rome are close enough that the airfare is unlikely to be the deciding factor for most trips.

What we can say from the data is narrower and more useful. Rome sits 5th in the cheapest places to fly into in Europe and Paris 10th, which puts both in the better half of the board but neither near the top. The Nordic capitals, Reykjavik and Dublin all cost less to reach than either, so if the trip is genuinely open, the value question has a different answer than the Paris-or-Rome framing allows.

The seasonality caveat is bigger here than most

Both cities are in the half of Europe whose peak season is the one most Americans want, and every figure on this page is off-season. Our grid takes the cheapest week in the six months after collection, which for the current snapshot runs from September into February.

That window flatters Rome slightly more than Paris. Rome's shoulder is long and its winter fares stay soft; Paris holds its price better through the autumn because the city has a business market underneath the tourist one. Whether that is enough to reverse the ranking in June is something our data cannot tell you yet, and I would rather say so than extrapolate. The second monthly snapshot at the end of September is the first that can show how these floors move at all, and a seasonal answer needs more than two.

Until then, treat the ordering on this page as an off-season ordering, which is the season most value travelers are shopping in anyway.

How to decide

Set the alert for both. They are close enough nationally, and volatile enough on individual routes, that a single drop will pick for you inside a few weeks. The Deal Alert Setup Wizard prints the line for each city from your own airport, so you know what a good fare to each actually looks like before an email arrives.

If you want the deeper picture on either city, the Paris guide covers all three of its airports and what the nonstop premium costs from every gateway, and our France guide puts Paris against Nice and Bordeaux. For Italy, Spain or Italy sets Rome in its national context, where it is the city carrying the whole country's median.