Hopefully by now you’re feeling a bit more confident in this miles and points game and have applied for a card or two, have begun to amass airline points, and you now have a collection points in your award wallet account. Congratulations!
If not, head on back to our previous Travel Hacking 101 Series posts to learn how to leverage credit card points to travel for free… and have at ‘er! Now it’s time to maximize those points. Some airlines offer stopovers and open jaws to award tickets. One of my favorite airlines, United, happens to be one of the most liberal for stopovers and open jaws. They have great award availability and allow 1 stopover and 2 open jaws for each round trip ticket. Of course they are not the only airline company to allow these, this is just an example. What’s this stopover and open jaw gibberish you ask?
Stopovers:
Stopovers are longer layovers. Basically, a layover is when you waste time in an airport (under 24 hours), but a stopover is an intentional break in the ticket that’s more than 24 hours. Think of a stopover as adding an extra destination to your travel plans.
Stopovers are:
- more than 24 hours,
- as long as you want – as long as it’s not too far out in advance,
- free on award tickets – in that they don’t cost extra miles.
This is a way to book a ticket to two places instead of one, and sometimes even more.
Example: Let’s say you want to use United miles to go from NYC to Rome (FCO), but you want to add a stopover in Paris (CDG) on the way. You’d simply book the itinerary online using a Multi-Segment/Mutli-City flight where you’d stay in Paris for a week and Rome for 10 days (or whatever you want). You would not be spending any more points for this route than you would a flight just to Rome and back.
Poof there you go. Magically you get to add an extra city to your itinerary for no extra charge. 🙂
Note, most airlines require the stopover to be in the same region as your destination airport. So a stop in one European city on the way to another European city.
Open-Jaws
This is a gap in your ticket where the airline is not responsible for transit. Say you fly from NYC into London (LHR) and out of Paris (CDG). The airline allows this gap but is in no way responsible for you getting to Paris, so you have to book your own car/flight/train/whatever.
You turn any stopover or destination into an open-jaw, effectively by adding an extra destination but adding the cost of transit. Again, you would not be spending any more points for this route than you would a flight just to London and back.
Another example would be Chicago to Bangkok, then leaving a gap and then flying Hong Kong back to Chicago.
Open-Jaws + Stopovers
Now here’s the fun part. Let’s combo things up and add an open-jaw to a stopover. Understand that the open-jaw doesn’t actually create another stop in the ticket, it’s just breaking up the trip in between a stopover. And again, you would not be spending any more points for this route than you would a round trip flight to one city in Europe and back!!
Let’s break this down into an example to see this beauty in action.
Going back to our first example, you have a ticket with a stopover in Paris (CDG) on the way to Rome (FCO). Well you can take that stop in Rome and make it an open-jaw and say that you’ll continue your trip back to North America from Vienna (VIE) instead of Rome on the way back.
If you had the time you could slowly make your way up to Vienna over land. Or you could use British Avios and book a ticket from Rome to Vienna. Or you could find a cheap Ryanair or EasyJet flight for a few euros. Either way, you created a gap (an open jaw) in the section of the ticket that stopped in Rome.
Now the ticket would look like this. North America – Paris – Rome / Vienna – North America. That gap between Rome and Vienna would be filled with other transit.
For the cost of a scenic train ride, a few thousand Avios points, or a discount airline ticket you were able to add a third destination to your trip.
The true maximization would then be to add in a second open-jaw. For example, instead of flying back to Chicago, you could fly to Miami to visit friends. You’d then be on the hook for that flight back from Miami to Chicago but it essentially gets half of your ticket accounted for to add in another trip to visit your friends in Miami before heading home.
Remember, the beauty here is that the points required would remain the same as well. If it were a United roundtrip flight using MileagePlus from North America to Europe and back you would be paying 60,000 miles, period. If it were a ticket from North America to Paris, then Paris to Rome, with an open-jaw to allow you to get to Vienna, and then Vienna back to North America; the ticket would also be 60,000 miles.
(Note if you are using a United partner it’s likely 66,000 roundtrip in economy instead of 60,000 if booking on a United operated flight.)
With Asia you could do a stopover in Hong Kong and then for the destination spilt Bangkok and Bali by using an open jaw there.
North America – Hong Kong – Bangkok / Bali – North America.
For our honeymoon years ago we decided to go to Iceland. Using United, this would be 60,000 points for a round trip flight from North America. But with this trick, we decided to add Norway to the mix for no additional points. Our trip looked like this:
Calgary, Canada – Bergen, Norway – Reykavik, Iceland – Albany, New York
We also could have added Oslo to the mix if we wanted to add a second open jaw (the first open jaw was flying out of Calgary but ending up in Albany for a wedding). In this case we would have flown to Oslo on United, the taken a train to Bergen and then flown out of Bergen to Reykavik. So it could have been:
Calgary, Canada – Oslo, Norway / Bergen, Norway – Reykavik, Iceland – Albany, NY
We opted not to include Oslo as we wanted to spend more time in the fjords and I had already been but you get the point.
I highly recommend checking this post from Travel Is Free to see how you can really maximize United’s stopover and open jaw rules. Drew is a travel hacking genius and I’ve found his site to be incredibly helpful. (This linked post of his is outdated and he’s recently sold his site and now works at The Points Guy but I’ve always found his writing to be easy to understand.)
There you have it. Open-jaws and stop overs are super easy ways to see more of the world for the same amount of points. Loyal readers know we are all about the hacks and trying to optimize life without spending extra for it and here is a prime example. Every airline will have their own rules (and they are constantly changing) so do some digging to see what your preferred airline has to offer when it comes to stopovers and open-jaws to try to maximize your experience.
Have you heard of stopovers and open-jaws before? If so, have you ever used them for a flight itinerary to get more bang for your buck? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
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