Book with Avios stopover as actually a second holiday

[flylesstravelmore]

I’m currently comparing oneway Avios options from MLE-LHR, and when trying to price MLE-DOH with price with Avois ba.com asks if I want a stopover… with LHR being the only stopover option.

Clicking through the options, and it allows me to select two journeys:

1: MLE-DOH-LHR on selected dates
2: LHR-DOH on a future date (e.g. 2 months later)

Seemingly you could have a long stop over at home before heading out. Naturally the site refuses to give a price for this, but:

A) Would the callcentre be able to do this as a single booking?
B) Would the pricing reflect the individual segments, or would there be an advantageous mystery price?
C) Why does BA.com offer a stopover at all for this journey? Are there any flight paths where the stopover option works well for anyone?

Thanks!

[davefl]

flylesstravelmore wrote:

Are there any flight paths where the stopover option works well for anyone?

I’ve looked at stopovers on countless occasions, even with Turkish and never found anything useful for me. Could just do a business meeting or dinner and that’s about it. Even the free stopover tours in Doha didn’t work with the flight from MAN

[John]

A) I suppose so, if you get a competent agent

B) Individual segments, as you need two other airlines besides BA before the multipartner chart kicks in. (If LHR-DOH-MLE happened to be a direct flight, i.e. same flight number for both legs, then the price for those segments would be based on the LHR-MLE distance rather than the component distances)

C) Sounds like a logic error in the programming.

Not sure what you mean by “flight paths where the stopover option works well”.

There isn’t any advantage of another flight to DOH 2 months later being on the same ticket.

You can get a “free” domestic connection to a long-haul so if you had a trip to Scotland 2 months later you could tag it onto the long-haul for no extra avios (but still pay taxes/fees). I’ve done this many times in the past but not recently so not sure if anything has changed.

If you have less than 24 hours in the UK you don’t need to pay APD. Someone going from Maldives to the US might find it useful to have a stopover in London.