Book a multi-city fare with a few days in Qatar,and your total cost shouldn’t go up by more than $15—making a stopover essentially free. What you will find, however, are exclusive deals: $20 tours of the new I.M. Pei Museum of Islamic Art, dirt-cheap desert safaris, and preferential rates from five-star hotels. Plus, the airline will waive the costs of a transit visa for stays up to 96 hours.
AirCanada
Compared to some other programs, AirCanada’s stopover scheme is a limited one: It subsidizes only the cost of a hotel room in Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver if your flight has a layover of six hours or more. (The hotel rooms are free if you fly in a premium cabin.) It’s worth it, however, to break up a long flight between, say, Houston and London—where you could pit stop in Montreal for a meal at Joe Beef and a few hours of sleep in a bed, rather than a cramped steerage seat.
Singapore
Adding a long layover in Singapore won’t come free on this airline, but your costs on the ground might as well be. Packages that start at $43 per night include everything from hotels to airport transfers—more than justifying an otherwise inconvenient promotional itinerary that nets you a cheap flight to Asia.
Etihad
It’ll cost you around $25 to add an Abu Dhabi stopover to your flight, but you’ll save what you’ve spent when you let Etihad coordinate an experience that suits the length of your layover—a steeply discounted set of holes, say, at the top-tier Yas Links Golf Club if you have only six hours to spare. Staying a little longer? They’ll set up free overnights at five-star hotels if you’re flying business or first class.
Turkish
Though you can’t stay overnight with Turkish Air’s TourIstanbul program, passengers with 6- to 24-hour layovers can join scheduled walking tours to see such sights as the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, and the Grand Bazaar free of charge. Everything from the guides, to museum admissions, to airport transfers is included—and you can leave your luggage with the service desk at the airport for a minimal charge.
Stopovers to Skip
Although most stopovers are promoted as “free,” some are anything but. Finnair made a push for its new Helsinki stopover program last year, but we found that the stops were hardly free; on some routes, they added as much as $320 to a fare and took us out of our way. Ditto stopovers in Sydney with Qantas—which cost about $200 and would be helpful only for onward journeys within Australia. The worst offender was Japan. A route we tested from San Francisco to Bangkok was $2,732 without an extended layover in Tokyo; with the layover, the price jumped to $4,169.