Planning your trip with a layovers, stopovers, or open jaws can help stretch your points! Here are a few strategies you can use.

Layovers

Generally you can have a layover of up to 24 hours for free on any ticket. It can be a great way to explore a city for a day or rest during a long journey.

We plan long overnight layovers when we go to Asia. For instance, twice we have taken a long flight to Japan and then stayed at an airport hotel. The next day we continue on to our destination. We're much better rested as a result!

If you're booking a ticket with miles, long layovers don't always appear in your search and you may need to call into an airline to book these. I go into more detail in my video on an example booking to Thailand.

Stopovers

Simply put, a stopover is a really long layover. However, a stopover is typically planned and allows the passenger to leave the airport and see another locale.

Stopovers can be a great opportunity to spend a day or more somewhere without the cost of multiple plane tickets. Some international airlines — including Turkish Airlines and Qatar Airways — even provide free or discounted tours or accommodations in the airline's home city on paid tickets.

Each airline has different rules about whether they allow stopovers, where you can stopover, and how long your stopover can be.

For international itineraries, a stopover is more than 24 hours, and depending on the airline's rules, you may be able to stay for several days.

Since different countries have their own entry rules as well, you will need to take into account visa requirements and additional taxes and fees for some stopover itineraries.

Some stopover programs are only available for roundtrip bookings and others are only available for cash or award bookings. If you are interested in a stopover, make sure you understand the rules of that airline/loyalty program since they vary quite a bit!

Some popular stopover programs include:

Open jaw tickets

Airlines view open jaw tickets as roundtrip tickets even though the passenger's origin and/or destination airports change.

This is important because if you are searching flights with different origins and/or destinations, you may find that one way tickets cost as much as roundtrip tickets. This is particularly true if you are paying cash and are flying from the United States to Europe.

In order to find open jaw tickets, you'll do a "multi-city" search. This is an option, alongside round trip and one-way, on airline websites and flight search sites.

Fortunately, the cost of open jaw tickets will be more in line with the cost of a roundtrip ticket, allowing you to fly into one city, explore, and fly out of another city without being subject to the high mark-up on one way flights.

For example, if your outbound flight is from Newark to Rome and your inbound flight is from Paris to Newark, you could purchase these tickets on one itinerary — rather than as separate one way tickets — and make your way from Rome to Paris on your own.

You could also purchase open jaw tickets where you return to a different airport than you initially departed from. For example, your outbound flight is Newark, to Rome and your inbound flight is Rome to Miami.

A double open jaw flight is one where your departure and return flights would both have different departure and arrival airports. For example, your outbound flight is from Newark to Rome and your inbound flight from Paris to Miami.

Each airline will have its own rules and restrictions around open jaw tickets. These rules and restrictions are not always clearly outlined, so the best way to find out whether open jaw tickets are available for itinerary is to do a multi city flight search of your desired itinerary.