Stopover: How to pay one ticket and visit two countries
When planning for a trip, most people are only focused on the final destination. What if you can add another city or even a new country to the same vacation? We went to the Maldives with a stop in Dubai and in this blog post I will help you to understand what is a stopover and how you can book a trip paying one ticket but taking advantage of visiting 2 destinations.
What is a stopover?
When you have to stop at an airport that isn’t your origin or destination, you have a connection. If you’re flying internationally, and the duration of your connection is less than 24 hours, you have a layover.
A stopover is any connection lasting more than 24 hours for an international flight and any connection lasting more than four hours in a domestic flight.
During our trip to Maldives, for instance, because we flew with Emirates and it’s mandatory to make a connection in Dubai, we call the airline to help us to extend this connection and make a stopover, so we were able to add one country to our itinerary paying for one ticket and visiting two destinations.
Stopovers can either be inconvenient, when you need to spend an extended period of time at the airport, or very enriching, when you decide to leave the airport and explore. This is what this post is about.
A journey of a thousand miles begin with a single step.
-Lao Tzu.
How to book a stopover?
When you book multiple destinations at the airline website, most of the time the final prices are higher than round-trips and people give up. The easiest way to build a stopover is to really call the airline and ask for help, particularly if you are part of any program with a good status. If not, here are some tips to build your stopover:
How to build a stopover?
- Go to Google Flights website
- Input your home airport. Example: SFO
- Leave the destination blank and click “Search”
- Make your dates flexible by clicking “Trip in the next 6 months”
- See the cheapest destinations around the world from SFO or your home airport
This tool allows you to find all the cheap routes from any city. After figuring out the inexpensive routes, you’ll just have to play with dates in order to find the best prices.
If you really want to visit a specific destination, you can also search for the destination instead of your home airport. So, let’s say I want to go to the Maldives, if I leave the airport blanck the flights from Los Angeles can be cheaper or faster and an option for this trip.
Another tip: you can add the price filter at $500 or whatever or are willing to pay.
One more tip: You can search up to five origin airports at once. So, let’s say you want to visit Miami or New York on your way to Paris, now you will enter your choice stopover destinations on step 1, but keep the destination blank. This gives you hundreds of options between airports in Europe.
After discovering the best routes and cheap flights, you need to enter your new route into the Google Flights multi-city tool. Example:
- San Francisco to New York
- New York to London
- London to Switzerland
This was how we ended up adding London to our trip to Switzerland. Why not, right?
Excited to travel more for less? Stay tuned for more tips like this and sign our newsletter for more.
