Last night I landed in Florence. I had four layovers on the way here, which doesn’t sound like a positive thing at first, but I booked them intentionally. Very frequently, if I have a long flight, I’ll book tons of long layovers and actually leave the airport on each one.
My first layover was in Newark for almost five hours, so I rented a car, drove to see my family in New Jersey for a couple hours, and then headed back to the airport. My next flight brought me to Lisbon for two hours, which was a layover I couldn’t avoid, but was too short to enjoy. It was early in the morning when I landed, and it was a short flight to my next destination, Amsterdam, so I got there early as well. I had twenty-two hours in Amsterdam, so I checked into my airport hotel, dropped off my stuff, and headed downtown.
Downtown I had some lunch , visited the Rijksmusem to see the Vermeers (I’m on a pointless quest to see all 34 Vermeers), visited the Van Gogh museum, had dinner, and then walked around the red light district before heading back to the hotel.
The next morning I woke up early again and headed to Zurich, which I was warned was incredibly boring. I managed to take the least direct train downtown, which gave me a mini tour of the outer edges of the city, I walked down the main shopping street, wandered through old Zurich, ate a couple Swiss chocolates, spent a lot of time down by the water watching the swans, took some pictures, and then headed back to the airport to work in the Swiss Air lounge. After eight hours total in Zurich, I headed to Florence.
This amalgamation of flights cost the same as a flight to Florence with the 1-2 unusable stopovers that would have been unavoidable anyway. Instead, I got to spend a couple extra days traveling to see my family as well as two cities/countries I hadn’t seen before. I wouldn’t want to do this sort of new-country-every-day traveling for long periods of time, but for 2-3 days here and there it can be a lot of fun.
You can also do it on a smaller scale, turning an otherwise unavoidable layover into a longer, better one. When Leo and I flew to China last month we had a nine hour layover in Vancouver, so we rented a car, bought some golf clubs at a used sporting goods store, and then headed to Stanley Park to play pitch and putt.
The best starting point to book a trip like this is to just put in your starting point and destination and see where the natural layovers are. For example, if I want to fly from LA to Barcelona, maybe that flight would connect in London.
Most travel search engines will try to minimize stopover length and duration, so you’ll have to scroll down the page a bit sometimes to see the trips that have stopovers. The stopovers will be short, but you’ll often see two different options for times. Maybe one has a stopover from 1-3pm in London and another from 8-9pm.
If you find a pair like that, you’ve probably got a good stopover on your hands. Most airlines will allow stopovers of under 24 hours for free, so now you go to that airline’s web site and search do a multi-destination search. In this case you would put in LAX – LHR (London) as leg one, and LHR – BCN as leg two.
You’ll probably find a pair of nonstop flights that you can book as a pair to have a nice long layover in London. The price will probably be exactly the same as having a short layover. However, if you look at each of those legs, you’ll see that there are some that have layovers, probably shown at the bottom of the page. From there you can repeat, searching for a multi-destination flight that has even more legs. You can repeat as necessary, until you have the amount of long stops you want.
Sometimes, like I had to do this trip, you’ll end up having to take legs with stopovers that you can’t use, just to get the timing right. Many times 8-11 hour layovers will be overnight, which isn’t much fun, so you’ll have to take a less direct route just to get the timing right.
This strategy works exceptionally well when booking award flights. Sometimes booking paid flights is a little trickier because the rules of different fares prohibit or limit layovers or connecting cities. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it’s awesome to have little miniature adventures, visit people you may otherwise not get to see, and get a preview of other countries that you may then become interested in for longer travel.
##
Photo is a swan on the lake in Zurich. These guys were awesome and not scared of me at all. Cruise starts tomorrow, so I’m going to write a couple posts on cruises.
Leave a Reply