airberlin topbonus - Online booking engine

I'm starting to look more closely at AB now, in anticipation of their joining OW next month. I've been playing around with the online booking tool and there are a couple of things I don't understand.

First, where is the button for 'advanced options' (or whatever they call it), I mean things like specifying a departure time or range of times, multicity bookings, etc.?

Next, for a particular day in July, the tool is showing four n/s flights from MUC to BER. It also offers three flights from BER to HEL. The timing of these seven flights yields five viable permutations. However, when I ask it for MUC-HEL, it gives me exactly ... one ... option. That routing has a 55-minute transfer at BER. What if I want to force a three-hour stop, say for a quick meeting? Do I have to book two separate trips, with all the inherent risks that that entails?

Any advice from the more experienced ABers would be greatly appreciated.

cheers,

Henry

As you can see, their online booking tool is not really that great. There are no 'advanced options', however, once you put in a date, it will give you a complete list of available options. For example, I entered MUC-DUS one-way for a specific date and was presented with 8 one-way options and 6 options with layovers. The same table also shows the saver and flex fares for each time, and if you click on any of them, you can get the complete price breakdown at the bottom of the screen. Under the table, you can go forward and backward on dates to see different options. Click on "open calendar view" to get the lowest price for 3 days before and after your date.

As for your second issue, I believe that AB does not charge for bookings made over the phone instead of on the web. If you want a particularly long layover, I would call them. I have only ever dealt with the US service center and they were fine.

Here is a listing of all of their fees. (http://www.airberlin.com/site/landingpages/travel_fees.php?LANG=eng)