(moved as I accidentally put this in the wrong forum before)

Hi all,

One thing I've been trying to do more of when traveling to international destinations is to find the longest layovers possible in interesting stopovers, so that I get to explore more countries on the same ticket. For example, recently traveled Los Angeles to Melbourne, with two stops (Manila and Hong Kong), which I stretched to ~24 hours for each stop, giving me 48 hours to explore each city on my way to and from Australia.

I've found that whether booking online or from the airlines, they're extremely resistant to extending layovers beyond 24 hours, saying that at that point it's no longer a layover at all, it's a multi-stop itinerary and generally costs much more money. Is there any way around this, or is it just the nature of the beast?