Free Stopovers in Europe, flying from NYC?
 

I'm mulling a few ideas for travel this fall and, for the first time, might like to take advantage of the free stopovers offered by a few airlines. Does anyone know of, or know where to find, a list of airlines that offer these stopovers in a Europeann city, when traveling from the US to another European city?

I believe that TAP offers free stops in Lisbon or Porto, Finnair does the same in Helsinki. I once read that AerLingus might let one stop in Dublin, but cannot find that info on their website. Not sure I am interested in Iceland right now.

Skyteam/FlyingBlue is my preferred network but will consider others if the stopover is tempting.

Final destination will likely be Spain, or perhaps Italy.

What do you mean by "free stopovers"?

If you mean one or more days between flights the only one I know that pushes stopovers is Icelandair.

Everyone else you use the multi-city / open jaw option on the airline website

By free stopovers I mean that one can break the journey without paying more.

Icalandair is one option, but Finnair also does this, with up to 5 days break in Helsinki.

I was looking for additional options.

Iceland Air is the king of free stopovers. We just did this, but discovered early on that the max stopover time was seven days. After that, prices went up significantly. We wanted to stay 10 days, so we just booked three one way tickets.

However, 'free' is relative. Iceland is extremely expensive, IMO, even more so than Switzerland.

The "price" of stopovers always has to do with the specific fare rules that come with your ticket. Every airline publishes umpteen fares between cities, which vary from one another in specific rules or restrictions, including stopovers, change fees, minimum or maximum stay requirements, and on and on.

Airline and OTA websites (Expedia et al) will automatically search for the cheapest fare on a given route, which might or might not allow "free" stopovers. But for a few dollars more, you might be able to stop over someplace, but the robots won't tell you that unless you ask specifically.

So use the "multi-flight" (or similar term) option on airline or OTA sites and see. Look at, say, JFK-Rome round trip tickets, then do a second inquiry with, say, JFK to Paris, then Paris to Rome, then back to JFK, with a few days in Paris. You might find that the total price isn't all that much higher than the round trip ticket, or you might find it higher. The stopover might not be "free," but it might be quite tolerable - a few bucks, maybe.

There was a recent article in the NY Times about this topic.
If the link doesn't work, the article was on June 3. You should be able to Google it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/t...ions.html?_r=0

Found this, too:


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/b...pgtype=article