When I started making reservations for an upcoming trip, I saw that we were being routed through NYC and DC, two cities we'd love to see, but don't have anything in the budget for. Remembering past travels that happened to include adventures during long layovers, I figured we could leave the airport and go on a madcap tour. Problem is, I don't know how to book it! All the sites have algorithms designed to minimize travel time.

Have you done this kind of travel? How did you force the long layover?

I have occasionally booked 'multi-city' itineraries so I can pick specific legs of my journey, when I have the chance to lay over in ATL ( have a good friend who lives nearby). Then I go for an overnight lay over. This doesn't always work out well for me cost-wise, though! What airline are you booking on?

I was thinking of Continental, just because their normal routing takes me through Newark on the way out and DC on the way back.
USAir seems like it could work too--they have some flights through DC and Philly (which is not NYC, but would still be neat)

"Not working out costwise" is one way to describe it--prices of the trip are doubling when I try multi-city!

Bottom line--not tied to a specific itinerary, just want a day or two of sightseeing in a cool city.

Yeah, that happened a lot more when I wasn't paying for DD's ticket, too!

One other thing I remember doing (just once!) when I lived in Bermuda - wanted to spend a few days in NYC, but main trip was home to TX. Booked a reasonable BDA-NYC-BDA ticket, landed in NYC, did my shopping, booked a separate NYC-DFW-NYC ticket, flew to TX,, then returned to NYC, grabbed my bags, checked them back in and caught the return flight of the original trip back to BDA. That time, two separate tickets worked out to about what the BDA-DFW ticket would have cost. Of course, this breaks the rule of having all your flights on one itinerary, as I would have been up the creek if I had any trouble getting back to NYC in time.

Where are you trying to go? You won't get a "day or two" - the most you will get on a domestic ITN is a long day, if that.

mz, not sure where you got 1 or 2 days; I'm hoping for 6-10 hrs. Purely domestic travel

You said you want a day or two to see a city. Anyways, 6-10 hours is definitely possible. When you search on united.com - Continental doesn't exist anymore - make sure you use advance search and make it display all connections, or as many as possible - 50. That should give you more options.

But of course, it depends on where you are flying from and to.

Look at one-way fares. Or an open-jaw: home-WAS, NYC-home, and then a one-way WAS-NYC.

That's assuming that WAS or NYC is your destination.

I just tried LAX-BOS at united dot com and it shows 25 results even when I select to display 50. I don't see a continue to page 2 link for the next 25.

I tried sorting by travel time and it showed shortest to longest times. Tried clicking the column title again to see if it would show travel time descending but it was still ascending values. Longest was 10 hours + but less than 4 hours connecting at IAD.

Maybe the problem is the long transcon flight + 3 hour time change gives fewer results.

Ok, itasoftware.com gives you tons of results sorted by fare, from lowest up. Click on the Duration column title and you get a slide bar. Move the left slide to the right to get the longest scheduled flights.

For June 14, LAX-LAS the lowest fare is $221 but only 8+ hours. The lowest fare 10+ hours is $359 via MKE. The lowest fare 10+ hours via NYC or WAS is over $600 via JFK.

I hope your origin and destination are closer together than LAX/BOS so that you have more long duration options.

should be: For June 14, <s>LAX-LAS</s> LAX-BOS ...

Wow, doing a roundtrip, LAX-BOS June 14-21, 1-stop each way with 10+ hours duration gives ONE result: Sun Country via MSP with the 8-hour stops being from 11PM to 7AM.

Wow because of the hundreds of millions of fares ita searched it found only one meeting the requirements.
http://www.itasoftware.com/technology/bos-sfo.html

Several good ideas to play with this afternoon/weekend--thanks, everybody!

Now I see the source of the misunderstanding--I meant 1 "day" (6-10 hrs) in each city, 1 each way. Sorry about that!

We're flying between TPA and CMH

Hello. Does anyone know the average layover time for airline travelers at airports while waiting for their connecting flight?
e.g. 45 min? 90 min? 2 hours?

Please and thank you,
James

75 to 80 minutes
http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=5785304&page=1

google is your friend

mrwunrfl, there's an article at the ita link you posted, but I don't see anywhere that I can use that software to search for a flight. Is it available to non-flight attendents?

OOPS--sorry. I found it. Man, these flights are expensive! Way higher than the usual search engines!