In terms of bringing the number of connections down, there's many direct flights to West-European hubs (London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf), and Croatian airlines has direct flights to each of those cities, and other airlines will have those as well. So thats only two flights, one transfer. On time, generally it takes about 9 hours to get to Europe, and Western Europe to Zagreb will be about 2 hours flying. Just a little homewrok to combine those with 2 different airlines.