Air France and KLM, which last fall added one of the industry’s most generous stopover deals to award tickets on its two airlines has now extended the privilege of a stopover of up to a year to award tickets it issues for its partner airlines.
A stopover is a stay longer than 24 hours in an intermediate city on an itinerary; in the case of the Air France/KLM FlyingBlue program, the eligible cities are their main gateways, Paris and Amsterdam, where many international travelers change planes for a final destination.
Most airline stopover programs allow only limited time, from a few days to a week for stopovers, but the FlyingBlue program allows travelers much more latitude. Up to 20 or so years ago, U.S. airlines also often allowed stopovers on international itineraries, but that disappeared a long time ago.
The new FlyingBlue deal requires booking award tickets by phone rather than on the carrier websites, since there is, so far, no way to program in the stopover, although that may change as time goes on. The stopovers are allowed on one-way, round-trip and multicity awards, less restrictive than a number of others.
Airlines that can be included in FlyingBlue stopovers can be mixed and matched, and include all SkyTeam member airlines as well as Air Corsica, Air Mauritius, airBaltic, Aircalin, Bangkok Airways, Chalair Aviation, China Southern Airlines, Copa Airlines, Gol Airlines, Japan Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Qantas, Transavia, Twin Jet, WestJet and Winnair.
Stopover programs have gained popularity in recent years with tourism promotion agencies and airlines. Airlines offer stopovers in their home cities as an inducement to choose their flights, and the cities benefit from increased tourism revenue. One of the first to offer was Icelandic; since all their trans-Atlantic flights stop in Reykjavik anyway, it played a key role in building Icelandic tourism.
