Stopovers can be a pain in the ass, or they can be a good reason to explore a new place, without having to pay the airfare to get there. For example, only this year I have been able to visit Turkey, Iceland and South Korea on stopovers that lasted between 1 to 2 weeks.
Oficially a stopover is stop you make in between two legs of your flight that lasts more than 24 hours, there is not really a limit to that, but I doubt my five year living in Colombia still counts as a stop-over 😉
My first stopover was in Istanbul, a city I had been wanting to go to since I wrote my Bachelors Thesis about Istanbul being the European Capital of Culture back in 2008. And now I would be passing by there on my way from London to Nairobi with Turkish Airlines anyway, it decided to stay there for a week.
IcelandAir actually made it even a ´thing´ promoting ´free´stopovers on many of their flights of which I made use for a week long stop-over between the USA and Amsterdam last summer.With free stopovers they refer to the fact that making this stop will not cost you anything extra. In some cases making a long stop over makes it count for two different flights, and thus increasing the price of each separate trajectory. However, I have found that if you play around a little bit with the amount of days you will stay in your stop-over destination the total amount of the flight price will always stay the same or even become lower. So basically you save money by exploring a new destination! Read all about how to travel budget in Iceland in my blog.
My last stop over was between Indonesia and Colombia. I decided to stop in South Korea for several reasons: the original travel time would have been around 45 hours, and I decided that I could only handle that if I cut it in half. Furthermore, South Korea is a country I would have never thought of visiting myself and it thus felt as a nice surprise. Finally, I always try to taste a little bit of winter even though I live in the tropics, and South Korea was very much experiencing snow at that time. Read about the Korean Food markets in this blog, and how to work remotely in Seoul in this blog.
So, now you are maybe wondering how to find these stop-overs and what to take into account?
- Something to take into account thought is the amount of says you want to stay on your stop-over. I have noticed that anything less then four days makes very little sense, because the first day you will still be tired from the first leg of your travel. The last day you are already preparing for the second leg of your travel, so you might want a little more time in between to actually explore. Especially if you are working on the road and thus do not have the whole day available.
- On deciding where I want to make a stop-over I look up the flight, for example on Momondo, Skyscanner or Google Flights, find the cheapest option and see which cities they make a lay-over anyways. For example, my flight from Jakarta (Indonesia) to Cali (Colombia) was going through Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Seoul (South Korea), Dallas (USA) and Bogota (Colombia), yes.. I told you it was a long one. Out of those cities, the only one I had never been to was Seoul, and thus instead of chosing the ´one way trip´ option on the flight search, I typed in the ´multiple city´. So my first flight was Jakarta to Seoul on November 28th, and my second flight was Seoul to Cali on the 9th of December. And it turned out that the price of these two flights was even 50 euro cheaper that the initial one flight I had searched for. I did have to try a little bit with the dates though.
- Something else to find out is where the hub is of the airline you are flying, KLM for example has Amsterdam as hub, Iberia has Madrid, etc. You can almost always make a stopover at a hub.
- Then, because we are living in 2018 and there is a tool for everything nowadays, I have used AirWander to get inspired. Basically you give the city you leave from, your destination and how long you want your stop-over to be, and they give a whole list of destinations and how much you will save (or have to pay extra) by stopping at that destination. You can add as many stopovers as you wish. It is a little addicting though 😉
- Something to take into account is that if you are flying with miles, the airline might have some rules or restrictions on (how many) stopovers you can put in. Make sure you check with the airline in that case.
- Make sure you check the visa-requirements when you are making a stop-over. In case the visa is very difficult and/or costly to obtain, or, you have to do it in your home-country, something that might be a bit tricky when you are out no(n)madding, it might actually not be worth it to make a couple of days stop-over.
The main thing is that you have to be as flexible as possible, in destination, in your dates of flying, in the amount of days you want your stop-over to be. Free stop-overs are great for us that have no time-limit but can be very tricky if you want to get to your destination fast, or if you are carrying a lot of luggage.
Hoping you find some great stop-overs there. I am just hoping that soon I have an excuse to go from Europe to the US again so I can stop in Iceland again, because one week was just not enough!!
