We introduced a few enhancements to our deal sheet in the last week. One of the key enhancements is including whether or not an international fare allows a stopover. A stopover is an inexpensive way to travel to more destinations for less.

Sample Stopover Information on the new deal sheet

The fare from Los Angeles to Singapore on American allows for 2 stopovers at $100 per stopover.

What is a Stopover?

A stopover allows you to stay in a connection city for greater than 24 hours and less than the duration of your trip. In this example, it is an extra $100 plus taxes and fees per stopover.

The natural stopover for most people on this fare might be Tokyo, however, this fare also includes possible connections in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul. So it is technically possible to stopover in those cities.

How to Search for Stopover? Start with a Simple Roundtrip Search.

We like to use Matrix by ITA Software to search. We recommend you start by reading our two articles on ITA to get a good understanding on how to use it first:

• Beginner’s Guide on How to Use Matrix by ITA Software
• How to Read Airfare Rules and Use It to Your Advantage

We will use the great American fare from Los Angeles – Singapore for $818 as the sample itinerary. The itinerary as per the fare rules allows for 2 stopovers at $100 per stopover. To search for a stopover, you have to start your search with a simple roundtrip.

Simple Roundtrip Search

 From this, we can gauge when there’s availability:

Very good availability for a roundtrip at $818

Now, let’s pick a travel date. We are going to use November 12th – 20th.

As you can see, the fare is in Economy (Q) class for most of the trip.

Here are the fare calculations. As you can see, it is $215 each direction and the rest are taxes and fees.

Use Multi-City to Search for Stopover.

We know that there’s availability for the fare from November 12th – 20th. The stopover needs to be inside those travel dates.

It will then lead you to a flight selection screen. Here’s what we selected.

$935

We got a stopover priced out to $935. That’s $818 + $100 stopover fees + extra taxes associated with entering Japan. Here’s the fee breakdown. If it does not price out, test all possible dates for the stopover flight. We used November 18th, if that didn’t work, we would’ve gone to November 19th and so on to see if a stopover is possible between the departure and return on the itinerary. In this case, we lucked out and a stopover was available. Just because a stopover is allowed on the fare rules does not mean it actually exists.

As you can see, the outbound fare increased from $215 to $315. It has taken into account the extra $100 for stopover. Taxes for Japan also increased.

Booking:

Use your favorite booking site or the carrier website. Use the Multi-city or Multi-Destination feature and enter each segment individually. If it doesn’t work, find a good travel agent to book it.

We used Orbitz.com to ticket.  So for about extra $120, you can visit an extra city just by taking advantage of the fare rules and playing around with ITA.

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