Stopovers and open jaws are two very important concepts in award ticket redemptions. So how do different airlines handle stopover and open-jaw rules on award tickets? (If you are not familiar with these two concepts, don’t leave yet—we’ll formally introduce them with examples later in the article.)
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United MileagePlus
Stopover and Open-Jaw Rules
A round-trip booking is required. UA no longer distinguishes between stopovers and open jaws, and instead uses a new term: Free Flight. The general rules are as follows:
- The Free Flight itself must be entirely within a single region
- There is no limit on the number of open jaws (in practice, each segment is priced as a one-way)
- To get a Free Flight, your origin and final destination must be in the same region. The departure and destination do not need to be in the same city
- The region of the Free Flight must be different from the region of departure
Regions are the key factor in determining whether a Free Flight is possible. UA Awards divide the world into the following regions: North Asia; Central America; Northern South America; Mexico; Hawaii; Southern Asia; Central and Southern Africa; the Caribbean; Japan; Australia and New Zealand; the contiguous U.S., Alaska, and Canada; Oceania; the Middle East; Central Asia; North Africa; Europe; and Southern South America. You can check which countries are included in each region at the link below:
Examples
- LAX-ICN 35,000, ICN-PEK 0, PEK-LAX 35,000: the ICN to PEK segment is effectively the Free Flight and satisfies the conditions above
- SEA-HKG 40,000, HAN-SIN 0, DPS-LAX 40,000: the starting point and ending point, SEA and LAX, are in the same region, and the Free Flight is within one region and different from the origin region. This itinerary actually includes 3 open jaws
How to Book
On the united.com homepage, select advanced booking (direct link), then choose multi-city. Just enter the itinerary you want segment by segment, and UA will automatically calculate the miles required. For example, the itinerary just mentioned:
- SEA-HKG, HAN-SIN, DPS-LAX. Enter them one by one and then choose your dates. Note that the routes you enter do not need to be nonstop—UA will automatically decide whether each segment should be nonstop or connecting. In other words, you just need to identify the key cities and break out the Free Flight separately.
After that, search and then select the flights for each segment. You can see that the total mileage is 40+0+40=80,000
Alaska Mileage Plan
Stopover and Open-Jaw Rules
One-way awards are allowed, and one-way awards can include a stopover. However, if you want a stopover, you cannot mix two partner airlines on the same itinerary segment; in other words, each segment can include at most Alaska Airlines plus one partner airline. There is also one exception: for domestic U.S. tickets, stopovers are only allowed on AS flights; awards on AA and Delta do not allow stopovers. In addition, intra-Asia awards also cannot include stopovers.
Since one-way awards can already include stopovers, there is no real need to worry about open jaws—just book them as separate one-way awards.
Examples
- ORD-HKG-DPS: choose Alaska’s partner Cathay Pacific (CX) for the entire itinerary, and spending a few days in Hong Kong as a stopover is a great option. It only costs 30,000/60,000/70,000
- LAX-NAN-SYD: spend some time in Fiji before heading to Australia—perfect. It only costs 40,000/55,000. If you are not departing from LAX, then you would need to use Alaska Airlines to fly to LAX,
How to Book
On the alaska homepage, select All search options, then choose multi city. Enter the routes and dates you need
Then just select the flights you want
Aeroplan
One-way awards are allowed, but stopovers are not. Round-trip awards are more complicated and fall into the following categories:
- Intercontinental travel (travel between two continents): on the website, you can only book either one stopover or one open jaw; by calling Aeroplan, you can book an award with two stopovers or one open jaw plus one stopover.
- Within the U.S. and Canada: you can have either one open jaw or one stopover.
- Travel from the U.S./Canada to Hawaii/Puerto Rico/Mexico/the Caribbean/Central America:
- Air Canada only: you can have two stopovers or one open jaw plus one stopover.
- Including a Star Alliance partner (such as UA): you can have one open jaw plus one stopover.
- Other travel within the same continent (travel within the same continent): stopovers are not allowed, but one open jaw is allowed.
To book, select multi city and enter the segments one by one
ANA Mileage Club:
One-way awards are not allowed. Round-trip stopover rules fall into two categories:
- Awards booked using the Zone Based chart: round-trip awards can have two open jaws plus one stopover.
- Round-the-world awards booked based on total flight distance can have up to 8 stopovers besides the origin (up to 3 within Europe and up to 4 within Japan). The final destination must be in the same country as the starting point. An open jaw counts as one segment.
To book, select multi city and enter the segments one by one
Asia Miles:
There are two award charts:
- If the itinerary includes only one partner, or one partner plus Cathay Dragon: one-way awards are allowed, and a one-way can include one stopover; a round-trip can include two stopovers plus one open jaw, and up to two transfers. Awards involving Air China or Iberia cannot include an open jaw or a stopover.
- Awards including at least two oneworld partners: besides the origin, you can have 5 stopovers plus 2 open jaws (the open jaws can be en route or at the origin), and up to two transfers.
Korean Air Skypass Miles:
There are three cases:
- Redeeming on Korean Air’s own flights: one-way awards are allowed, and a one-way can include a stopover.
- Redeeming SkyTeam flights: one-way awards are not allowed; a round-trip can include one stopover plus one open jaw at the destination, and a round-trip ticket can have at most two transfers between the origin and destination (including the stopover point).
- Redeeming other partner flights: one-way awards are not allowed, and a round-trip can include one open jaw.
To book, select multi city and enter the segments one by one
Lufthansa Miles & More:
One-way awards are allowed, but a one-way cannot include a stopover. For round-trips, if all travel is within the same region, stopovers are not allowed. For cross-region travel, you can have two stopovers plus two open jaws, but stopovers are subject to strict restrictions:
- Tickets with stopovers must be booked by phone.
- You can have at most one stopover on the outbound and one on the return.
- The stopover point cannot be in the same region as the departure point (for example, an award ticket departing from Los Angeles cannot have a stopover in New York).
Singapore Airlines miles (KrisFlyer Miles):
One-way awards are allowed, but stopovers are not permitted on one-way tickets. Round-trip awards come with one free stopover and one open jaw. You can also add a stopover for $100 (by phone), up to a maximum of three stopovers total, regardless of cabin class. Stopovers are subject to the following restrictions:
- No stopovers are allowed on purely domestic itineraries.
- No stopovers are allowed on itineraries wholly within North/Central America and the Caribbean.
- No stopovers are allowed on itineraries wholly within Europe.
- A stopover cannot be in the country of departure.
When booking, just choose multi city and enter each segment one by one.
Other airlines
- American Airlines miles (AAdvantage): Stopovers are not allowed. One-way awards are permitted.
- Delta miles (SkyMiles): Stopovers are not allowed. One-way awards are permitted.
- British Airways miles (Avios): Mileage is calculated by adding together the one-way segments.
What are a stopover and an open jaw?
About stopovers
Suppose you fly from New York to Tokyo, spend one week in Tokyo, then fly to Beijing, stay at the Beijing airport for three hours, then fly to Shanghai, spend a month in Shanghai, and then fly back to New York. The itinerary looks like this:
In this example, Tokyo counts as a stopover, but Beijing does not. Why? Because a stopover is defined as a break of more than 24 hours between flights; anything under 24 hours is called a layover. In this example, Beijing is a layover. You might ask: what if I stayed in Beijing for 23 hours, would that still count? Yes! We usually call that a long layover, and on an award ticket it does not use up one of your allowed stopovers.
So how long can a stopover be? In theory, as long as you want. But since one ticket generally has to be completed within one year, you can think of one year as the practical upper limit. Used well, a stopover lets you visit an extra destination.
There is one special case here: if your ticket is entirely within the United States, then a connection longer than 4 hours counts as a stopover.
The example above is a standard round-trip with one stopover and no open jaw, so in theory you could book it using any of the following mileage currencies: UA, ANA, Air Canada, Asia Miles, Alaska Airlines miles, Korean Air miles, Lufthansa miles, or Singapore Airlines miles. (Of course, in practice it is usually best to use Star Alliance miles for this.)
About open jaws
So what is an open jaw? It means your outbound trip flies from A to B, but your return trip flies from C back to A. In that case, there is an open jaw at the destination end. For example, in the itinerary below, you fly from New York to Los Angeles and then return to New York from San Francisco. Drawn out, it looks a bit like an open mouth:
So what is a double open jaw? It looks like this:
In the example above, repeat after me: the destination of the outbound is not the origin of the return, and the destination of the return is not the origin of the outbound. In this situation, there is one open jaw at the origin end and another at the destination end. Unless otherwise specified, when we talk about an open jaw, we usually mean one at either the origin or destination.
Open jaws and stopovers can also be combined. In 2015 New ANA Award Redemption Guide (1), I opened with the following example:
And in Introduction to Airline Alliances, example 3 gave us this ticket:
In both of these tickets, we created an open jaw at the destination, with stopovers in Singapore and Osaka respectively. These are both standard examples of one open jaw plus one stopover. Not only can you book them with ANA miles, you can also use UA miles or Singapore Airlines miles.
Does anyone know what other mileage programs could be used to book the two tickets above? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.