Hi all, are there any ways to get a same-day stopover at a reasonable price? For example, I would love to fly from cleveland to newark, have the day in newark, then fly to seattle that night; but without paying 3000 dollars?

Simple answer: fly internationally. Most (but not all) international fares permit stopovers of up to 24 hours. Domestic fares usually only permit 4 hour stopovers.

Also, this only works if the stopover city is part of a legal routing. For your hypothetical example of CLE-EWR-SEA, this probably wouldn't work. Looking at the legal routings for CLE-SEA, presuming there are flights that work, possible stopover cities might include DTT, CHI, GRR, and MKE, among others. Although this isn't a hard rule (there are always exceptions), generally speaking legal routings require you to be making some sort of forward progress towards your destination--thus, such a severe backtracking from CLE-EWR on the way to SEA is probably a no-go.

A point of order: connections less than 4 hours on domestic fares, or connections less than 24 hours on international fares, are not considered stopovers, even if they are overnight. So, if you're on an international flight, you can arrive at, say 4pm, stay the night, and make your next connecting flight at 3:55pm the following day, even if you have a "no stopovers allowed" fare.

It's important to get the terminology right, as you might run into someone that is reading the fare rule that says "no stopovers allowed" and give you grief if you say you want an "overnight stopover." If it's less than 24 hours, it's not a stopover on an international fare as far as the fare rules are concerned - it's just a connection.

As far as I know, this can be done an unlimited number of times along a valid routing. At some airports, you may be subject to a departure tax if you make an overnight connection.

You could book a short connection in EWR but then "miss" your flight and show up at the airport much later due to a "meeting that ran late".

Caveats: (1) Don't fly an airline that hits you with a standby fee. (2) Make sure your intended flight has availability before you do this. (3) Expect a wrath of FTers to call this practice unethical.

When do you want to return to CLE from SEA?

If it's a few days later, than you should have no problems getting a circle trip CLE-EWR-SEA-CLE at a reasonable price. With a Saturday night stay in SEA, I pulled up a boatload of $450 fares on Continental (added benefit: two of the three are non-stop flights).

Without a Saturday stay ... well, there's a few ways to get around that too, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Mook

Thanks for the correction on my terminology. Steve is indeed correct about the connection v. stopover issue--for instance, a friend of mine was able to arrange a 23-hour "connection" at NRT so that he could spend the night in the city. This did remind me, though, that it is always worth reading the fare rules on international itineraries, because sometimes one (or more) stopovers will be allowed, and they won't have the 24-hour restriction (on the fare my friend was traveling on, the only city where a stopover was not permitted was NRT).

As far as the number of connections permitted--it depends on the airline and the fare rules. For instance, Continental generally says "unlimited online connections" for its domestic trips while Northwest generally limits valid (domestic) routings to no more than four connections in each direction.

Why on earth would you want to "have the day in Newark?" :-) BTW, I'm originally from New Jersey so I can make these jokes.