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I want to go from Canada to some countries in Europe, but I found pages like Google Flights, Orbitz, Cheapoair, Flight-Hub that can help you to book a CHEAP VERY CHEAP flight!!! Awesome! Many of these options go through USA or London and for sure there are non-stop flights.

I want to stay some days in London in order to continue my flight to Schengen territory. But all of these pages try to optimize the flight lenght and price and you can do just a connecting flight in London immediately or for a couple of hours.

Is there a way to have still London as transit location but for more days and then continue the trip to the rest of Europe with a connection flight later but in the same itinerary?

Any trick to do this and where can I find info about it, because google redirects me to all these pages of flight schedules. I would like to remark if it could be done in the cheapest way possible. Please don't tell me that I need to buy another ticket or buy one-way ticket and then the return later.

Is there affordable company that can manage this in Canada, but without a tour plan? I want to stay longer and discover Europe by myself.

I wouldn't care if you give backpacker advices. Everything is welcome. Everything on a budget.

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    You would need to find fares that allow stopovers. However those are usually only allowed on slightly more expensive flights, or may have limitations on the places where you can do the stopover. You'll probably be better off booking a return flight to London, then hunting down the cheapest flights/trains for the rest of your journey.
    – jcaron
    Mar 2, 2016 at 20:45

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You can use one of the more powerful flight search engines (and especially ITA's matrix) and look at their “multi-city” function. It still requires a lot of work and trial and error because planning to stay a few days at a transit point means you are not eligible for the same fares anymore so there are many many combinations and you cannot really guess whether a given itinerary will be cheap or not from a simple search.

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What you are looking for is a stop-over. Honestly I still did not find a way to search and book those for a truly low-cost price. Many sites, such as Expedia, give you the option to search for multi-city trips. As far as I saw, those were always relatively expensive.

In order to find a reasonable fare, you have to do lots of trial-and-error, including different ordering of stops and different dates. You should try:

  • Nested round-trip tickets which often cost less. This basically means something like Canada-to-UK round-trip and within that UK-to-Italy round-top, for example. A few years ago I saved a friend over $1000 by finding him such an itinerary as opposed to a 2-destination flight.
  • Open-jaw tickets where you bridge the gap some other way, possibly by ground or air with a local low-cost carrier. We found a reasonable deal and did this last year by trying dozens of city permutations.
  • Award bookings often allow flexible rules which include one or two stop overs. Of course you will need to come up with the points, but many have done it. While generally expensive to buy, it is possible to top-off if you already have points but not enough for your intended trip. You can also get a substantial amount of bonus points from time-to-time but finding those opportunities is time consuming itself.
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