Originally Posted by
tjh21cen
Hi, I am trying to split up a long flight to Tokyo. I'm coming from Rochester NY. The best I have found is through Seattle. I would rather take two 8 or 9 hour flights than one 14 hour flight, especially if I could stop somewhere for a day or two and get used to the time change on my way to Tokyo. When I limit a search by duration, it gives you the shortest entire travel time, including all flights, not necessarily the international flight. Is there a search out there that will help me? I wouldn't mind going through, vancouver, hawaii, anything, I mostly just want to avoid a super long flight. Thanks for your comments.
Probably the only airports in N.America with flight time of <10hrs both directions are YVR and SEA. Possibly YYC and PDX on a good day, ANC is charters only. Unless you're willing to drive to YYZ, there is no way to get to any of those places nonstop from where you live. Otherwise it'd be 1-stop flight just to get to Northwestern N.America, from where you're looking at 9~10hr flight to TYO. So that seems like a lot of trouble, and I have to tell you that a stopover like that is not going to help you at all in getting used to the subsequent time change. There's a 7-hr time zone difference between SEA/YVR and TYO. Stopping through Hawaii may or may not help ease your time zone adjustment (for me, I don't know that it would really). But that would be a very roundabout way to get to TYO from upstate NY and most likely expensive.
There should be plenty of ways to get to MSP on a short flight from one of the airports near Rochester. And then MSP-TYO is ~12hr (shorter coming back). Only a couple hours longer than the SEA-NRT flight. Would that work? Actually, 12hr on Delta will feel much longer than a slightly longer flight on ANA from ORD.