Find a stopover

corblimey

After a hellish long-haul flight (2 of em) earlier this year, I've vowed never to fly for more than 5-6 hours at a time, if I can help it. However, that doesn't mean that I want to stop travelling to far flung places, more that I'm willing to split up the journey (with at least 1 overnight in between the 2 legs).

Firstly, is this a bad idea? Has anyone tried it? I suspect if I travel say 6 hours east, then all I'll be fit for is sleep, especially if I've got another 6 hour flight coming in the next 24hrs, so no point in spending extra money on a hotel room, etc.

Second-of-ly, assuming I'm onto a winner with this idea, how do I go about finding suitable stopovers. Say I'm going to Japan, which is 12 hours away, so I want to find a flight to somewhere that's 6 hours away, and then find a flight that's 6 hours from there to Japan. That's an awful lot of searching on ba.com, etc. Is there a site or anything that would allow me to find destinations that might be suitable? I'm thinking of something like maps.google.com but on a global scale?

Slice

Maybe you should just choose a decent airline to fly with?

finbarrk

Opodo have a multistop flight search. It might suit you.


http://www.opodo.co.uk/opodo/flights/multistopFlights

corblimey

finbarrk wrote: »

Opodo have a multistop flight search. It might suit you.

http://www.opodo.co.uk/opodo/flights/multistopFlights

Thanks, but only helpful if I know the middle (stopover) city. My first problem is determining where I can stopover.

Ponster

corblimey wrote: »

Firstly, is this a bad idea? Has anyone tried it?

The price of the 2 individual flights may be a LOT more than the price for just the one.

edit : I found this site which at least gives you the flight distance between airports.


I don't know if you're doing it the right way though. Imagine that you want to fly from Dubin to Japan. How about deciding that you want to stopover at Moscow for example and then fly onto Japan rather than wasting time compiling the elist of all the cities that interconnect Dublin and Japan.

This way you get to go where you want but doesn't take any fiancial issues into account.

Trampas

Decent airline with decent seats (legroom, comfy, headrest, and Video on demand) helps.

no kids climbing about also helps.

if you have the above 12 hour flights are fine.

steve-o

If your stop is less than 24 hours it is counted by the airlines as a connection instead as a stopover, so the stop should not cost any more.

But stops will often add considerably to the overall journey time. Flights to Tokyo go over the Arctic, so there's not much in the way of stopover options en route. You'd need to deviate significantly to stop somewhere interesting.

Heading to somewhere in South Asia opens up more options, but there are few long haul flights from Dublin, so unless Abu Dhabi takes your fancy, you'd need to first connect somewhere in Europe to get as far as a midway stopover. But more than one stop will normally need more than one airline and that can add considerably to the fare.