I’m doing some travel for work and my options are flying through London, Frankfurt, Paris, or Dubai. Since I’ve done this trip several times and visited all the cities except one I think I’m going to plan a 24 hour layover in Dubai to get a taste of the place. I’ve never been to the Middle East and that should be interesting.
I’ve spent a little time in Singapore between flights, an unplanned stop in London on my way home from France, and a too brief overnight in the Sapporo airport before a ski trip. Only in London did I really have time to leave the airport but I wanted to see a bit of Singapore. In Japan I was just too tired to think straight and slept soundly in an airport hotel.
How many of you have done a 24 hour (or less) layover while traveling? Which cities and what did you do while there?
Amsterdam is the only place I’ve done it. Just because I like a day there when I get a chance. Other than that I’ve never had more than a few hours layover when traveling.
I think I’d like to see what Los Angeles was all about for a day. I’ve seen it on TV and movies almost daily my entire life but being a midwesterner I just have no concept of what it is actually like in person. I bet there are many landmarks I could gaze upon and recognize from media. And also experience the weather. And the traffic. And palm trees. And famous people. And different burger joints.
I had to travel to Kuwait last minute to present a proposal that I had only peripherally been involved with. My condition was a 24 hour layover on my way home. Since the flight was on KLM my layover ended up being in Amsterdam. Perfectly cromulent place to spend an October day. I arrived from Kuwait on a red-eye, and was walking out of Centraal Station around 6:30 AM.
Paris. I used to work on a project in Gabon and getting there involved a 17-hour layover in Paris from early morning to about midnight. On one trip I took the train from the airport into the city, then hopped on a double-decker tour bus where you could get off and on at the different tourist attractions. In between the Eiffel Tour, Notre Dame, and the other sights I would doze off on the top deck after my red-eye flight.
On later trips the project paid for a hotel room at the airport so I took advantage of that, but on my last trip I stayed on for several more days in Paris to see it properly.
I’ve only done this a few times and it wasn’t intentional, it was just that the tickets were cheaper if I had an 8+ hour layover and that seems a fair trade for cheap tickets.
Most recently, NY, Amsterdam, and Minneapolis. I could have used more time in the first two. 6 hours is about all I need in Minneapolis/St. Paul and I never need to go back there intentionally, but I thoroughly enjoyed my day of sightseeing.
I’d just want to go to Honolulu since my son is stationed at Pearl Harbor and I hardly ever get to see him. Otherwise, I’m going to sleep - wake me up when we’re finally there.
Dubai; they are supposed to have some terrific amusement/waterparks and I would love to actually walk around that place after seeing it so often on Travel Channel shows.
Bahrain is nice. There is a local city bus that stops right at the terminal, and for a buck, you can ride all the way to the end of the line and back again, which is literally the whole length of the Kingdom of Bahrain. The turn around point is near the university, where you can get off and eat lunch. The downside is, you have to pop for the $75 visa to get through immigration, which is becoming pretty common throughout the world these days.
Tokyo is nice, too. You can book a night at the Narita View hotel, for about $40, which has nice peaceful walking trails behind the hotel in the woods. The shuttle to the hotel is free, and so is the shuttle from the hotel into Narita town, which is a pleasant and perfectly Japanese town. There is also a train station in Narita town, if you want to go into Tokyo.
If you fly Turkish airlines from anywhere in the USA to anywhere in Europe, all flights have an overnight stopover in Istanbul, free hotel and transfer. My wife loved that, and always flew to Europe on Turkish just for the stopover.
Skip Guam. I had a 21 hour layover there, it seems impossible to get a bed in Guam for less that $100 a night including taxis, and there is no other ground shuttle.
If you have a stopover in Port of Spain, Trinidad, walk out the car rental exit and across the patio and eat at El Haaq, beautiful cheap Arabic (and local) food in a nice outdoor atmosphere. Best food Ive ever had within a mile of an airport.
I once took an ultra-cheap flight that had a 9-hour layover in Bucharest. Came in at around 5 am and you could get an on-the-spot visa for some insanely small amount of money, so me and the girl in the next seat (I think, coincidentally, she was also Australian … anyway, we’d bonded on the plane) thought ‘screw waiting in the airport all day’ and went sightseeing. We just wandered around the center of town but it was actually quite fascinating - loads of old monumental architecture of decaying grandeur mixed with 1950’s Soviet Concrete Block. And Romania wasn’t much of a tourist trap, so easy to wander around even as obvious westerners without being harassed. I’d go again.
Same here. I’ve never had anything near a 24-hour layover, but I once had about six hours in Amsterdam before catching a flight to Cape Town, and the airport is so conveniently set up there with easy, quick transportation to the city centre via train (about 20 minutes) that I popped into town, walked around a bit, enjoyed some food, and popped back out. (I had been there before, so I had some idea of the city layout.) But that’s the only time I’ve ever left the airport on an international layover. Most of the time, even with a time period of six hours to kill, I just kill it in the airport. It’s just that I knew Schiphol and how quick and easy it was to get in and out of town that I did it.
I did layovers several times at Narita, Japan. JAL had a hotel nearby, the room was part of the fare (15 hrs, non stop from Chicago), plus included meals and transfers. It was an awesome arrangement if you were flying on to Bangkok, S’pore, etc. It greatly eased the jet lag on arrival. But, alas, they don’t offer this fare any longer.
Also did a layover in Amsterdam, many years ago now, 21hrs I think it was. And once unexpectedly in Hong Kong, after a long flight delay leaving San Francisco.
As I age I am always keen to find a layover that makes sense, when headed on truly long haul flights.
Where it was once cheaper routings that included layovers, these days it can up your total fare considerably to include them!
Aside from Dubai, which I will never visit beyond a layover, I’d like to explore Amsterdam for a day to see about a future trip there. It’s also possible for work travel (I go to Bangalore India each year) to fly through Mumbai from NYC and layover there. I’d like to spend some time exploring somewhere in India that isn’t Bangalore.
Closer to home I fly through Chicago a lot and have never gotten out of the airport. But those trips are usually pretty short and I wouldn’t take an extra day in the middle.
On several occasions I’ve done 21 hours in Tokyo . . . because I really like Tokyo. Well, to be honest, I like a particular gay sauna in Shinjuku. Since my sleep schedule is already really messed up by trans-Pacific travel, why not have a little fun between naps? And then do some shopping and trainriding.
