Originally Posted by
Horace
3. Itineraries with stopovers (such as spending a few days in a city where you would connect anyway) are treated as separate flights. No free stopovers. There may be cases when a connection is very long (such as when the second segment does not depart until the following day), in which case you could think of it as a short stopover on a single ticket.
Specifically, for international itineraries, "a stopover occurs when there's a break in travel of at least 24 hours." So, you could arrive at a particular airport at 7pm, and as long as the continuing flight is scheduled to depart by no later than 6:59pm the next day, it's a connection and not a stopover. I frequently use this when departing internationally to take the flight from my originating city to the hub airport where my int'l flight departs the following day. This makes it much less likely that I'll miss the long-haul flight due to a problem on my initial flight.