Buying a plane ticket is simple: you have a point of departure, a destination and a flight with or without connections in between.

But many travelers like to combine the pleasant with the useful, and add a little variety and flexibility to their itinerary, for example to visit a city where they have a stopover, or not to leave the same city on their return flight as they did on their outbound flight.

All this is possible, sometimes for a price, but sometimes for free.

By definition, an itinerary is not flexible

In general, what’s pleasant is never free, and the airline world is no exception to the rule. By definition, a trip is :

• A point of departure and a destination, a destination from which you will return to your point of departure on your return flight.
• Connections that are designed to be as short as possible, to enable you to move from one flight to another, not to go sightseeing.

These are the basic rules for the “basic” ticket, which is normally the one you’re going to buy, and they’re clearly explained in the description of your ticket’s fare class if you take the trouble to look for the details.

After that, anything is possible in terms of itinerary flexibility, but this will lead to a more expensive fare…unless the airline has a generous policy and decides to offer it to you under certain conditions.

Let’s take a look at what we’re talking about, and how you can add a little flexibility to your itinerary to make the most of your stopovers and your destination.

Layover (or connection)

A layover is the waiting time between two flights on your itinerary. It lasts a maximum of 24h (23h59 minutes to be exact).

Today’s airlines are trying to reduce connection times as much as possible, for the comfort of passengers (but also to climb to the top of the booking engines with shorter journey times), but this isn’t always possible. For example, there are flights that traditionally operate in the evening, and if your feeder flight is an early one, you can treat yourself to a nice connection on the spot. Beautiful enough to do a bit of sightseeing for free.

For example, a connecting passenger in Paris on a flight to Asia departing in the late evening can try to find (when offered) a long connection with a flight arriving in the morning.

On airlines whose hubs operate 24 hours a day, it is easier to find such long connections (Turkish Airlines in Istanbul, Emirates in Dubai…).

If you have a long-distance connection, there’s nothing to prevent you from leaving the airport (except in very specific cases) to take a stroll around town (provided you meet the entry requirements, such as a visa). Please note: you’ll need to go through all the checks on your return to the airport, which should be taken into account when calculating the length of your getaway.

If you have a “long” connection, some airlines even offer services to make your waiting time more pleasant.

For example, Turkish Airlines offers you a free hotel if your connection lasts more than 9 hours in business or 12 hours in economy. Similarly, if you have a connection longer than 8h, the Turkish airline offers to show you around the city, but more about that later.

Emirates’ “Dubai connect” service offers hotel accommodation for connections lasting between 10 a.m. and 24 p.m. There is also a service for longer connections, which we’ll talk about later.

Sometimes, airline websites only offer the most “optimized” (i.e. short) connections, but you can get around this by using an online travel agency. For example, on one of my last trips, Lufthansa didn’t offer me a long enough connection in Frankfurt to Singapore for me to take full advantage of the First Class Terminal, but by using an online travel agency I found a connection that took around ten hours. Here it wasn’t to go into town (although I could have) but to test a service at the airport, but the logic is the same.

There’s another way to get a nice layover between two flights.

The idea is to take two separate flights on two separate tickets. But here we’re talking about a self-connect logic, with all the risks that entails, and not a correspondence logic as such, since we’re talking about two tickets that have nothing to do with each other. And in this case you’ll often have to collect your luggage and check it in again, whereas in the case of a real layover you don’t have to worry about this. Not so anecdotal: if you arrive before the check-in counter opens, you’ll have to leave your luggage in the locker or keep it with you all day.

It happened to me (even if it wasn’t my original goal) with 10h in Singapore between a Singapore Airlines flight and a Lufthansa (which allowed me to go go for a walk and visit the Jewel) or in Gothenburg with 6 hours between a Turkish Airlines and a Lufthansa… You can use this time as you like, but if you delay too long and miss your flight, you’re solely responsible (unless you have a flexible ticket that can be exchanged free of charge, of course).

But you can also plan a longer stay to get more out of your connecting city.

The stopover or break during your trip

A stopover is a real stop of more than 24 hours. You stop for 24 hours or more in your connecting city to make the most of it. Both flights are on the same ticket, but you have a real break in your journey, you collect baggage, etc.

There is no technical limit to the duration of a stopover other than that of the ticket’s validity (1 year). There’s nothing to prevent you from taking a 1-month stopover in Singapore between Paris and Sydney and taking advantage of the opportunity to visit the city, Thailand, Bali and the

sourroundings.

Not all tickets allow a stopover, and often the right to stopover will move you to a more expensive fare class…but not always.

Remember one thing: the stopover is a form of flexibility in your ticket, so it has to be paid for except when it is in the airline’s interest for you to stop.

I mentioned Emirates and Turkish Airlines above. These airlines make it easy for you to organize stopovers, even pay for your hotel for 1 to 3 days, depending on your class of travel, and even offer excursions.

So you may be wondering why some airlines charge for stopovers, while others offer them, even offer you a hotel, and sometimes even charge you less for the ticket? The answer is simple: the development of local tourism.

Air France and American Airlines, for example, charge for stopovers. Why ? Paris or New York (in the case of an American Airlines connection in New York) are by definition destination cities. Passengers don’t need any special incentive to want to stop there; their reputation speaks for itself. A large number of Air France passengers passing through Paris have Paris as their destination, compared with the total number of passengers passing through the airport.

On the other hand, Dubai (Emirates) or even Istanbul (Turkish Airlines) are seen by most passengers as connection cities. Huge hubs where you’re just passing through, because the airlines operating there have built their appeal (and their fares) around this logic. Dubai and Istanbul are very attractive destinations in their own right, but in relation to the mass of passengers passing through these two airports, very few have them as their final destination. They are merely passing through. The aim of making stopovers easy, cheap and attractive is to send a message to the passenger: “Spend a little time, a little money, and you’ll want to return just to visit us”.

And often it’s not the airline’s initiative alone, but a joint program with local authorities, the Ministry of Tourism or equivalent, which uses the airline as a promotional tool and (co)finances these initiatives.

Finally, these stopover programs can be an integral part of the airline’s practices (they work all the time), or only take place at specific times in the form of campaigns, as seen for example with Oman Air, which at one time wanted to put Muscat back on the world tourism map for its premium passengers.

Open Jaw to leave from a different city than the one you arrived in or to return to a different city than the one you left from.

Another way to add flexibility to your trip: not returning from the same city you arrived in. For example, if you’re going to visit the United States, you arrive in New York and plan a trip that will take you to Los Angeles. Obviously, for your return, you want to go straight from L.A. to Paris and not have to go back via New York, which is more tiring and reduces the time you’ll spend in California.

This is possible with an Open Jaw ticket (no reference to Jaws). It allows you to book flights from A to B and from C to A with no flight between B and C.

But you may want to be even more demanding and not return to your city of departure. For example, you leave Frankfurt to go to Singapore, leave Bangkok (so Open Jaw) to return to…Munich. This is called a Double Open Jaw.

Unsurprisingly, whether you’re talking about Open Jaw or Double Open Jaw, you’ll have to pay for it, and you’ll find yourself in “expensive” fare classes. The price of flexibility.

We hope this has given you plenty of ideas for organizing your routines in the future, so that you don’t just enjoy your final destination, but take time where you want it and don’t waste it where you’re not interested!

Image : connecting flight by BCFC via shutterstock