CleverLayover Finds Cheaper Flights in Stopped Cities
One way to save on flights is to add a stopover on your way to your destination. Rather than booking a round trip with one airline, you search each leg of your flight yourself to find a cheaper route that includes a long stopover. But it can take a long time. CleverLayover does all the work for you.
It is often cheaper to book a flight between cities and transfers than a round trip from point A to point B. For example, once I went on a trip from Rome to Santorini. It was cheaper to fly from Rome to Athens in Santorini, so I booked a trip to several cities with a long stopover in Athens. Bonus: I had to explore a completely different city.
Thrifty travelers have been doing this for ages, but it takes time to find all the possible route options. You should be looking at different airlines, different dates, and different cities. That’s why a group of Harvard Business School students have developed CleverLayover, a tool that does all of this work for you.
You enter your departure, destination and travel dates, and the tool searches for all flights that pass through hundreds of airports around the world. As a result, you get several different route options, including transfers. CEO Phil Hu recently explained to Conde Nast Traveler the idea behind the site:
Hu’s analysis showed that bundling tickets from non-partner airlines resulted in 70% cheaper flights worldwide. And when better deals are found, those savings will average 20 percent, or about $ 400. (During the soft launch, the site returned cheaper options for 33 percent of all searches, with an average savings of $ 300.) “If you look at airline search in general, there has been no significant innovation in the industry since meta search. Hu said. “We created this search engine that can search the entire chart of all possible flights and find savings for you. And we do it based on several necessary graph search and machine learning algorithms. Because you cannot search at once in a couple of thousand flights. “
But let’s say you missed your flight. Since you do not book with the same airline for every leg of your journey, the airline is not obligated to help you connect with another airline. But this is not so much a flaw in the tool as a method: if you yourself found a route with several airlines, it would be the same story. But to avoid this problem, CleverLayover includes a “delay protection” option.
I tried this tool using an imaginary trip from Houston to Tokyo from July 31st to August 14th. The cheapest direct round-trip option I found when searching for Google flights was $ 1,976. But Google Flights also featured a roundtrip ticket for just $ 961 with a stop in China. Here are some options I found with CleverLayover:
Prices are about $ 60 cheaper with longer stops in China. You can hover your mouse over the gray transfer bar to see how long each transfer takes. These routes do not appear in Google Flight search because, again, CleverLayover compiled routes that include different airlines. I also tested the Los Angeles to Tokyo route and I saved about $ 300 with stops in Vegas and Vancouver.
If you are a fan of the transfer method for booking cheaper flights, or at least pushing another destination out of your trip, this tool can make the process much easier. See for yourself using the link below.