I recently posted a thread inquiring about a trip to Holland and Belgium this coming fall. I was originally looking at flights in October, but my wife decided she would rather go in September which has much more limited flight availability. Basically the only way we could travel business class on IAD-AMS would be to leave 9/10 and come back 9/19. I was hoping for a trip that was a day or two longer, so I have been looking into booking a stopover in another city for a day or two, such as Copenhagenm Zurich, or Frankfurt. Unfortunately, I am a bit confused as to how stopover awards work.

I went to the UAL website and did a multiple destination search for IAD-AMS on 9/10, AMS-FRA on 9/19, and FRA-IAD on 9/20. The only direct flight availability it showed for the AMS-FRA flight is at 2:55 PM which will not leave us much time in FRA, so I decided to try ZRH instead. I ran the same exact search substituting ZRH for FRA. THe direct flight AMS to ZRH leaves late in the evening so that is a no go, but it shows a flight to ZRH connecting through FRA at 12:15. THis is where I get confused. If there is a flight from AMS to FRA landing at 12:15 how come that didn't show up when I did the search for FRA originally?!!?

I'm sorry if this seems like a very basic question, but I have never booked a flight with a stopover before.

Could be a few things...

1) Are you searching just AMS-FRA or as part of a multi-segment itinerary? If the latter the results shown are often less broad.

2) It could be married segments, but probably not.

If you can spot it in any way the phone agents should be able to book it for you.

Thanks for the tip! I've been searching as a multi-segment trip. I will try searching each segment individually.