Back in the day, most airline loyalty programs allowed free stopovers on award tickets. This used to be the policy with American AAdvantage, Delta SkyMiles, and United MileagePlus. Unfortunately nowadays fewer and fewer programs are offering this unique opportunity that can stretch your miles further.
Continue reading: Guide To Stopover Rules On Airline Award Tickets: Which Programs Allow Them?
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Right . Very surprised that Ben doesn’t know that being in this business. The other option is even more grim - he keep recycling the same articles on slow days without even reading them …
Is anyone else having the 'something went wrong' issue preventing them from checking Flying Blue availability? It's been going on for maybe a couple of weeks for me, and I'm not being helped by the fact that I finally dropped from silver to nothing on the 31st and now the WhatsApp comms take forever.
Once again Ben, you have proven that everyday is a school day. Thank you for this insight into the flight finding stopover, etc, etc, process. I collect such webpages for possible future information.
Hi Ben, do you know anything about Alaska Air stopping stopover awards on Alaska? (Per loyalty lobby https://loyaltylobby.com/2025/09/08/reader-question-has-alaska-airlines-killed-stopover-awards/?omhide=true). It would suck if this was true.
hi Ben,
Thank you for always providing such valuable information.
I'd like to inform you that the ANA Round the World award ticket was discontinued as of June 2025.
A reader from Japan
@ Alex -- I believe this is a tech glitch. I recently confirmed that there are no plans for the program to change the stopover policy.
@ Throwawayname -- On the website? I'm not having any issues. Have you tried a different browser, or incognito?
@ Stan P -- Sometimes I forget specific details. This is an update of a post from a long time ago, and I made a bunch of updates (since policies changed materially since then), but sometimes I'll miss a couple of things.
Of course, he is being a jerk on purpose. His mother would be ashamed if she knew of his spitefulness.
There are many airline loyalty programs, each with many details. No person can know them all . . . or read all of the terms and conditions. Some details aren't discovered unless one stumbles upon them . . . or are "blind spots" to an airline & are not publicly shared for fear of being shut down. But, given the volume of information, sometimes something simply doesn't make it from the to-do list to the updated web page.
I just know that if you add a stopover, the prices are higher. Effectively, there are no free stopovers anymore.
This could be new, but it is not true that stopovers can be added for "no extra miles" on Flying Blue, UNLESS the entire itinerary is operated by Air France/KLM. I learned this the hard way, and not even Flying Blue reps understand it, but it's explained on the Flying Blue website here: https://www.flyingblue.com/en/spend/flights/rewards
"For the segments operated by Air France or KLM, the origin and destination of the itinerary determine the pricing.
Example 1: For the itinerary LAX-DXB, with a stopover in CDG and fully operated by Air France, the pricing is based on LAX-DXB.
Example 2: For the itinerary AMS-DPS, with a stopover in SIN and fully operated by KLM, the pricing is based on AMS-DPS.
Partner-operated segments are always priced separately per partner for Flying Blue reward tickets. For stopovers on outstations, no additional charges will be applied.
Example 1: For the itinerary FCO-MSP, with stopovers in AMS and BOS, and with FCO-AMS-BOS operated by KLM and BOS-MSP operated by Delta Air Lines, the pricing is based on FCO-BOS + BOS-MSP.
Example 2: For the itinerary AMS-AKL, with stopovers in SIN and SYD, and with AMS-SIN operated by KLM and SIN-SYD-AKL operated by Qantas Airways, the pricing is based on AMS-SIN + SIN-AKL."