How to manage a longer transit location in a cheaper way

Upvote:3

What you are looking for is a stop-over. Honestly I still did not find a way to search and book those for a truly low-cost price. Many sites, such as Expedia, give you the option to search for multi-city trips. As far as I saw, those were always relatively expensive.

In order to find a reasonable fare, you have to do lots of trial-and-error, including different ordering of stops and different dates. You should try:

  • Nested round-trip tickets which often cost less. This basically means something like Canada-to-UK round-trip and within that UK-to-Italy round-top, for example. A few years ago I saved a friend over $1000 by finding him such an itinerary as opposed to a 2-destination flight.
  • Open-jaw tickets where you bridge the gap some other way, possibly by ground or air with a local low-cost carrier. We found a reasonable deal and did this last year by trying dozens of city permutations.
  • Award bookings often allow flexible rules which include one or two stop overs. Of course you will need to come up with the points, but many have done it. While generally expensive to buy, it is possible to top-off if you already have points but not enough for your intended trip. You can also get a substantial amount of bonus points from time-to-time but finding those opportunities is time consuming itself.

Upvote:5

You can use one of the more powerful flight search engines (and especially ITA's matrix) and look at their “multi-city” function. It still requires a lot of work and trial and error because planning to stay a few days at a transit point means you are not eligible for the same fares anymore so there are many many combinations and you cannot really guess whether a given itinerary will be cheap or not from a simple search.

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