Long-haul (2 leg) booking with overnight stay?
 

I'd like to be able to do this, Amsterdam being the city in question.

Would like to avoid the 6am departure for AMS from DUB, and then connecting 3, 4 5, hours later to long-haul. Would prefer to take afternoon flight to AMS , spend the night :cool: and leave the following day. Airlines being either Aer Lingus /KLM.
Have never found out how to do it, at no extra cost at time of original long-haul booking.:ugh:

Booking on line perchance? If you give more detail but you might start looking for 'multi-leg' or 'multi-hop' or 'stopover' and similar options and they should give the chance to make a night stop. bear in mind that different ticketing rules aply and adding the stopover might increase/decrease the overall cost.

As always, if you can be flexible in your dates and timing, you can get cheaper.

Long-haul (2 leg) booking with overnight stay?
 

Did ring KLM a while back , but got tired of hanging on.:zzz: I'm very flexible, time wise, less so money wise. :ooh: Mostly it's travelling KLM to South America, Central America and Caribbean, out of Dublin. I really like Amsterdam and Schiphol is not a magical mystery tour like LHR.

Just a suggestion but on many of these flight search engines they offer an am or pm preferred departure of not a specific hour of departure, have you tried that, i.e. departing DUB pm?

Also shopping around helps, different search websites offer different fares and schedules, if you post where your ultimate destination is that might help us to help you!

dohouch These are airlines, they use Yield Managment software.

With an overnight stop may be worth looking at separate tickets if the long haul flight is cheaper ex AMS than DUB.

If travelling from the UK business class you could avoid the long haul APD by having separate tickets or a 24 hour stop over in Europe.

When making your booking you will normally have options as to the timings of the flights and you may be offered suitable flights as part of the normal booking process. Longer layovers are often cheaper as they are less popular, avoiding timings used by business men will bring savings as well. An early afternoon midweek flight is virtually guaranteed to be cheaper than the 7.00am one on Monday morning.

Less likely though. I recently looked at an DUS-AMS-LAX return in C class. It was €1900 cheaper from DUS than direct from AMS (same flight, same dates).

The last time I wanted to make an overnight (with KLM) I had to do it by phone through their reservations department. But that was a few years back.

A light just went on.................
 

:ok:

If at the start of my search, I enter a late afternoon DUB departure, the search engine will probably offer me a departure for the following morning as one of the options for the long haul section. Mind you, I did try that on the Lufthansa site, hoping for an overnight in Frankfurt, (used to live there. ) and and rather than Frankfurt it rerouted me through Munich.......

Have no flight over AMS in mind at the moment, as the next up is an overnight to BUE through Frankfurt.

Try the search engines such as Kayak and Skyscanner. Unusual combinations may bring a surprise in the fare, for example Singapore Airlines from Manila to Johannesburg return is cheaper than Singapore to Johannesburg return direct, despite being 3.5 hours longer each way. Emirates Brisbane to Dubai is dearer than Brisbane to London despite being 7 hours shorter, reason being if someone only wants to go to Dubai there's a reason for it and they'll pay, where as if they want London they can easily fly on another airline.

A direct flight is usually more expensive than a connecting one, but not always. Sales take place in various cities which could make a different routing worthwhile. An increase in capacity usually results in some good promotions, I recently got an unbelievably low fare because the airline concerned had added another daily flight on the route and needed the seats filling.

Bangkok and Cairo are cheap places for business class seats, London to New York has incredibly expensive business class but this gives the airlines their profit so they can be more generous with the economy fares.

The key is doing your homework, shopping around and being flexible.

I can't help feeling this may be a reason to use a ............. travel agency.

If you insist on using online resources you may need to build the itinerary yourself using the "multi city" option that isn't terribly obvious on many websites. This allows you to specify dates for each leg of your journey rather than just the "out" and "return" dates.

Dohouch, there is a wealth of yield management knowledge in the answers to your questions, even if they are easy to read and might even seem a little bit uncomplicated. I am not going to single out any individual post because some of us SLF rely on this knowledge to get good fares for ourselves and there is no point in pointing out the details to airline Yield Management people who read this forum.

You could usefully try these suggestions, or if you need a quick solution, then the whole post about the travel agency is exactly the same that I heard given to a group of industry insiders by the head of yield management for an airline.

Not sure if travel agents always offer the best deal. Recently booked flights next year and there was almost a £100 difference between the airlines website and travel agents best price for identical flights / dates etc.

The travel agent suggestion wasn't about how cheap some much as meeting the requirement to spend the night at the transfer point. The trouble with the websites is that they just assume you want a quick connection. If you have access to a reservations system such as a GDS you can look up the rules for a fare (which may, or may not, limit connections) and then pick and choose individual flights to meet the rules.

The OP's question was specific to an extended connection time in AMS so likely to be specific to KLM.

A number of years back I had a business trip to FCO which was PDQ followed by a day of business in Netherlands.

So I booked KLM BHX/AMS/FCO/AMS/BHX and no matter how I tried I couldn't get a long enough connection on the return in AMS to complete my day of business there without paying an arm and a leg for it, upon enquiring I learned that longer than a few hours in AMS then KLM charge for it.

I threw the AMS/BHX leg of my KLM journey away and rebooked that with BMIbaby.