Completing second leg of travel on a different day

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I do this a lot, and the answer is, it depends!

When pricing any international ticket you may take a break of 23 hours and 59 minutes at any connecting city before it counts as a stopover.* As such if you spend 23 hours at B you are still, from the pricing perspective, "connecting" between A and C. You would be free to leave the airport at this time, subject to any visa requirements.

(When pricing wholly domestic tickets the time is usually reduced to about four or five hours, but there is no hard and fast rule in this case.)

However, you must arrange this at the time of ticketing. Simply put, cheap air fares are not changeable. You cannot expect to walk up to the ticketing desk and achieve this on the day.

Now, if you want a break of longer than 24 hours, this is called a "stopover". Many times, this will trigger an expensive repricing of the ticket. For instance if you were doing New York to Copenhagen via London, introducing a stop in London will often double the price of the ticket. However, many times it will not. If you are travelling on Emirates they are very happy for you to take a free stopover in Dubai.

In general terms, the only way to tell is to feed in your requirements into the pricing engine and see what comes out the other side.

To do this use the "multicity" option and feed in your requirements as A-B, B-C, C-A (or whatever). But one trick you can try is always to see if you can get A-B arriving and B-C departing within 24 hours, because it will often keep the price the same as the A-C/C-A fare.

(* This also applies to fare components that are wholly domestic provided they are included in a ticket that also includes international fare components; but occasionally domestic fares may defeat this presumption by an explicit statement in the Stopovers category.)

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