Layovers
One of the things that can really get your trip off to a bad start is missing a flight or having your luggage miss a flight. I recommend a minimum of 2 hours for a layover and, if you are connecting to a smaller airline or going through a large airport (like London Heathrow or Dallas or Newark…), then allow even more time. Smaller airlines may be cheaper, but they aren’t as reliable and can take longer to reunite you with your luggage if it arrives at a different time. (There were 2 ladies on one of my tours who went without their luggage for 4 days!) Then of course if you are going through a large airport, you most likely will have to go to a different terminal which can take a considerable amount of time and, if your first flight is late, then you’re likely to miss your second flight. (Another 2 ladies missed a day tour they had scheduled prior to joining my tour.) Is it really worth it to save an hour at an airport when you are going on a trip that is a week long or more???
Fewer Connections = Less Problems
I recommend going to the site kayak.com and looking for flights from your home airport to your destination and trying to find the flight that has the least connections with the appropriate amount of time for layovers. You can check the box on the left for 2 stops – don’t go for more stops than necessary just to save money. It can ruin your vacation!
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Purchase Flights from the Airline
Kayak will generally link you directly to the airline to purchase your tickets. And, I do not recommend purchasing your flight on any other site that you use for comparison (like expedia). I would recommend going to the major airline site and book the flight on their site. If you book on the airline site directly:
- you have a person to talk to if there is an issue regarding your flight,
- you can usually pick your seats, and
- you can sign up for miles.
For instance, if you are flying from Dallas to Glasgow and American Airlines is the flight from Dallas to London (it says “operated by” below the flight), then go to the American Airlines website and search for flights from London to Glasgow. If you can’t find the same price online, call them and ask for the specific times you saw on the other site, and see what price they can come up with.
If this is all too confusing, just contact me and I can help you.
Low Cost Carriers
In addition to searching on Trip Advisor, I also use 2 other airline websites:
Iceland Air allows you to take a layover in Iceland. They have a fairly short layover in Iceland (near Reykjavík) but it is a small airport and they control the flight in and the flight out (both are on Iceland Air) so they make sure you make your connection.
Some more notes
If you go to one of the sites where you can book hotels, flights & cars and use that to book the cheapest flight possible, I’ve seen a couple of issues with that:
- The layover time between flights may not be long enough so you end up missing your connection and your luggage also misses the connection so it can be delayed several days.
- The cheapest flight may have you taking 4 or 5 flights when you only need 2 or 3, which causes a larger likelihood of missing connections and losing luggage.
- It’s harder to find things on their sites like where to enter passport information or to select your seats.
I also had a couple who had purchased their tickets using the Hopper app. They routed them from the UK to Chicago to Philadelphia. That intermediate flight (Chicago to Philadelphia) was cancelled, so Hopper rebooked them a day earlier, which meant that they were supposed to leave the UK before their tour was over. Hopper sent an email saying “You’ve been rebooked.” It took them a week of calling and not getting through and then calling and getting though but getting cut off multiple, multiple times before they finally got their flights fixed.
For personalized help, you can just contact me.