iowa guy

I have not been to Europe.
These posts have been very helpful to me. Especially realizing that a one-night stop over may not be much of a benefit to me as far as getting a comfortable night sleep before my arrival in Greece. The best place for a night-stop would probably be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. :-) I didn't give much thought to the fact that I would be so close to Greece at just about any stopover location in Europe.

With that being said, I am sure that Istanbul would be a great place.

I think my real issue is that I don't know how to properly book this flight. I have only ever booked round trip flights and chosen, either, the quickest or cheapest route.

My goal is to fly from DSM to ATH then return from JTR (Santorini) to DSM. I haven't found any good flights from JTR to DSM when I use search engines to route me. Should I be looking at buying a series of one-way tickets and choosing the route that is the quickest--or is that likely to be the most expensive way to do this? It seems like flying back to ATH from JTR and then flying to DSM is much quicker than any route that google flights or kayay has found.

iowa guy

I'm not sure what that means but I like the JTR reference since that is where I would like to depart on my return to DSM.

JBord

You don't want to book all one way flights, as that would be expensive. But you need to consider a few different options.

In your simplest itinerary, you want to go DSM-JTR-DSM, with no stopovers. You can look at this as a round trip flight. But I suspect you'll get many more results if you consider ATH your destination. So search on DSM-ATH-DSM. Then buy a separate ticket to and from JTR. Just make sure you leave enough time to account for delays. On the way to JTR especially, you may want to stay a night in ATH after you arrive and leave the next morning for JTR.

Now, if you want a stopover, use a multi-city search. Let's say you want DSM-AMS (overnight)-JTR (or ATH). You can do a multicity search where you input your exact airports and departure dates. You'll want to book this as a round trip where you leave and return from the US in order to get the best prices. So the cities you'd put in would be DSM-AMS-JTR-DSM or DSM-AMS-ATH-DSM as your multicity search airports.

Alternately -- you can book DSM-AMS-DSM. Then buy a separate round trip AMS-JTR-AMS that fits within the first trip. Again, just leave plenty of connection time in AMS.

Hopefully that all makes sense.

There are literally dozens of ways you can make your itinerary work, these are just a few. But once you get to Europe, there are a lot of discount airlines available to you for intra-Europe flights that aren't available as part of a round trip from the US. It's a lot of work to do the searches and get the right times and the best prices, but many of us do this regularly to get the most out of our European holidays at the best price...so it can be done. Good luck!

shefgab

From what I can see, starting/finishing is DSM significantly increases the ticket costs. ORD is a much cheaper place to leave from, so either drive to ORD or buy a separate ticket to start your trip.

I find Google Flights to be a really excellent planning tool. I don't know what your dates or budget is, but i've found this trip on Turkish for $832:

https://www.google.co.uk/flights/#fl...18*2.GBP.66418

5 Sep ORD-IST 2140-1615
6 SEP IST-ATH 1915-2045
18 SEP ATH-IST 1010-1135
22 SEP IST-ORD 1400-1735

For a similar price you can book ORD-ATH, then LHR-ORD, and you can buy separate connecting flights ATH-JTR, then JTR-LON. Depends where you'd like to stop.

shefgab

From what I can see, starting/finishing is DSM significantly increases the ticket costs. ORD is a much cheaper place to leave from, so either drive to ORD or buy a separate ticket to start your trip.

I find Google Flights to be a really excellent planning tool. I don't know what your dates or budget is, but i've found this trip on Turkish for $832:

https://www.google.co.uk/flights/#fl...18*2.GBP.66418

5 Sep ORD-IST 2140-1615
6 SEP IST-ATH 1915-2045
18 SEP ATH-IST 1010-1135
22 SEP IST-ORD 1400-1735

For a similar price you can book ORD-ATH, then LHR-ORD, and you can buy separate connecting flights ATH-JTR, then JTR-LON. Depends where you'd like to stop.

iowa guy

I think I am slowly catching on, thanks for bearing with me.

Is "DSM-ATH-DSM" the same as a round-trip DSM-ATH ticket?

JBord

Yes, exactly. You have an origin, a destination, and a return. You can search on DSM-ATH round trip. If you want a stopover, with Athens as your "destination", you do a multicity search. In that case, using AMS as a stopover example, you have to put in DSM-AMS-ATH-DMS, each one entered separately. It basically works like a bunch of one-way searches, but as long as you begin and return in the same place (actually as long as you begin and return to the US, city shouldn't matter), you will not pay the high price of 3 one way tickets.

My advice is just play around with the multicity search and see what results you get. If you've decided against a layover somewhere, try pricing flights round trip to ATH and then purchase a separate round trip ATH-JTR. Cities in Europe are fairly close. You could also book a round trip to another major airline hub city (for example, FRA), and then book a separate ticket to JTR, whatever works for you. Only you can decide what is the right itinerary and price, so you'll need to play around.

I would agree with the poster above as well, Google Flights is an excellent free tool to check on a lot of different routes and prices all in one place as a starting point.

iowa guy

In order to expedite my return to DSM (Des Moines) from JTR, would there be any other airport that I might want to fly to when departing JTR instead of ATH? I was thinking that there might be an airport that would have more/quicker flights to the U.S. than ATH.

KLouis

Given that the distances always remain about the same, to have "quicker" flights means that you need to stay for shorter times at the airports in which you will be connecting combined with the lowest possible number of connections. Searching for this may be something you'd like to do during X'mas vacation. Start by trying to find where (in addition to ATH) JTR is connected by non-stop flights when you plan to fly, as this will be the limiting step in the "chain reaction" DSM-JTR. At any rate, I was somewhat confused by your first posts: are you planning a stop-over in ATH on the way in? Also is DSM connected to any of the North American cities that have non-stop connections to ATH? W ould you accept ORD instead of DSM? Any preference for airlines or FF programs/alliances? Lots of parameters, as you can see, and only you are in position to say whether you'd accept a price for an itinerary that you find to your taste.

downinit

Iceland is about the only place that is 'on the way' without being quite close to ATH. There are frequently very good deals via RKV, depending on where you plan on catching the TATL flight. Not sure if it is an ideal layover spot, but at least there are some hot springs. CPH, AMS, and WAW are all very good options for a layover, as they are all excellent cities for exploring on a short stay. They each have their own very unique feel and ambiance, which is nothing like any place in the USA. AMS is very safe and I find the canal ring area by Centraal to be absolutely charming, despite the superficial seediness. It is the one city I keep returning to on almost all of my multi-country trips to the EU, regardless of where else I will be wandering off to.

KLouis

RKV (and not REJ, no airport anywhere in the world with that code) would be sort of ideal for what OP needs, but there is a catch (not catch22 though): No flights between RKV and ATH to my knowledge next September. At least one more connection would be necessary...

iowa guy

Why are distances always the same? No airline flies a straight line between DSM and ATH. A quicker flight would mean shorter layovers, less stops, and less flying miles.

KLouis

@iowa guy: Short post, long answer!

It was you who sort of thought of airports providing more and quicker flights than ATH! Given that there is not one airport in Greece, other than ATH, with non-stops to the US, I suggested that the only way to get faster to DSM from JTR would be, as you correctly also say in your answer to me, through "shorter layovers and less stops". "flying miles" will change only a little (the distances between the two end points may vary by, perhas, less than 100 miles depending on the route and the connection airport) while "award miles" (if this is what you meant) is not necessarily the case as most FF programs award miles not on the actual distance flown but on the great-circle distance. This is particularly true when the itinerary consists of more than one segment, though with the same flight number. A similar situation is also true for spending miles where DSM-XXX-ATH-JTR would become North America-Europe.

I understood your original post as needing a place to break your trip and, thus, not having to be on a plane (and quickly change planes at your connecting airports). What I suggested (though perhaps very indirectly) is that you should check the connection times at the first airport after JTR, as the actual flying times will be the same ± half hour while the connections may vary between one hour and much, much more.

Having flown HER-USA more than 40 times of which ATH was, often, the first of my connecting airports the overall time to reach my final destination differed by as many as 10 hours without overnighting on the way. To that time, add the time needed to calculate the time needed for the different connection possibilities based on the time of departure (there are more than 15 European airports with non-stops to the USA that can be reached from JTR during the summer months) that my final advice is a really scientific one: pick the simplest solution, this is also what nature does!

AlanInDC

Personally, I would not do the spend a day layover in Europe plan in this circumstance. I do not sleep well at all in coach. So the idea of the redeye from Des Moines to Europe, little sleep, then walking around a European city upon landing, does not appeal at all. And especially true for someone who has never visited Europe. Though you can get pretty far with English in general, you will be in a foreign country and things are different. I'd rather push on to Athens as quickly as possible.

If you think you can get adequate sleep on the flight to Europe, then it is more do-able.

Palal

A couple of points:
1. If you can start from an airport with a larger variety of airlines (e.g. ORD) you can save serious $$. I'm checking DSM-JTR//JTR-DSM on random dates in SEP it's coming up at $1600. If you start at ORD, it's around $1000.
2. If you don't fly directly into Greece, you can get ORD-LON/MUC/FRA/MAD/BRU for around $500-600 return. (I expect these prices to come down around March or so).

The above points come with a couple of caveats:
- you'd need to figure out how to get from, say, LON to Greece and back and from DSM to ORD and back. The first is easily done with low-cost carriers. The second is easily done with a redemption of Avios on AA.
- separate tickets mean that if you miss the connection nobody but you is responsible for your onward tickets, so having enough time to connect is important. A day of padding is more than enough in my book.

If you decide to buy everything on one ticket, you can use multi-city search to get layovers of up to 23h59m in any connecting city without a price increase. This means that it's still considered a connection and if there's a delay the airline will rebook you on the next available flight.