Layovers can often be an annoying part of your air travel. Hours wasted in the airport waiting for your flight. But have you ever thought about if you could change your layover to a longer term and enjoy the area you are in? There are ways to do this very thing! There are various websites out there which specialize in planning layovers to save you time and money. In this article we will look at three websites and compare them to see the advantages and disadvantages of each. Airwander, Kiwi, and Cleverlayover. For the sake of consistency we will search for round trip flights from Denver to Casablanca with a layover in London for 5 days on the way out (or wherever suggested in western Europe) For the sake of simplicity we will select the recomended flight option. Let the games begin! At the end we will do a quick Kayak Multi-City search to compare.
Airwander
This website is pretty impressive. Their user interface makes it easy to find layovers that work for your schedule. Working similar to a multi-city travel search, Airwander looks for flights with layovers in the areas YOU want to be in. Not sure where you want your layover? Airwander has plenty of suggestions and their costs. It allows for layovers on the way out and back.
Denver to Casablanca Via London — 
So you can see there the flights here are pretty inexpensive. It gives you 3 total days in London with fights for the first and fifth. Notice that the flight days are long (53 hours on the return flight with 5 stops!!). It is also worth noting that the airlines used here are low fair airlines which don’t allow check bags without fees. Of the three Airwander is the easiest to use and also adjust to exactly the times you want to fly, although to do so it sometimes removes the price reduction desired in a layover flight.
Kiwi
Kiwi is a fun site to play on. Much light google flights it allows you to explore a map searching out destinations by cost. It also allows you to add more than one destination to your arrival and will search out cheaper prices for both destinations. Unlike the other two search sites it offers more of a traditional milti-city approach to searching. In order to search for useful layovers you would need to chose the milti-city option as with other sites.
Denver to Casablanca Via London — 
Although this image is a little blurry you can see the clickable map on the right. You can also see that the cost for this trip is more than with Airwander. However looking at the flight times you can see that the trip is much more desirable. A suggested 25 hour trip as opposed to 53 hours, although there are still a lot of flights in there. It is %20 more expensive though. The website itself isn’t as user friendly and takes more work to get flights you are interested in. However it is more customizable and offers more solutions that might be slightly outside of your search. Kiwi also offers a ‘target area’ option which allows you to search airports in an area inside a circle for prices. Pretty neat to play with.
CleverLayover
CleverLayover offers a different approach. The user puts in the beginning and ending points with dates and CleverLayover suggests layovers in different places. This will allow you to let your mind search out different places to go! If you select advanced search you may change the length of layovers and even put in a specific place for the layover.
Denver to Casablanca Via London —
As you can see there are a lot of stops in these flights too, but CleverLayover was able to place the first leg squarely in the requested times and with shorter flights that either of the other two. Still using low cost carriers the return flights are longer than with Kiwi. The price is the lowest of the three though. The user interface with CleverLayover leaves a lot to be desired as it is more utilitarian than useful.
Kayak
Doing a multi-city search on Kayak is pretty easy. Their user interface is easily figured out and fun to play with different cities and dates. Here is the seach results:
Denver to Casablanca Via London —
Although Kayak doesn’t have a fun map to play with, or layover suggestions, or a playful theme they did put down a good price for some great flights. As you can see the flights above are a great combination of price and time on excellent airlines. Kayak is owned by Price Line but continues to be competitive in the arena of flights.
Conculsion
So what has been learned here? I think that the lesson is clear. Never buy a ticket from the first site you look at. Comparing flight prices, times, distances, and layovers is very important. Here Kayak has the best option. However with just a few changes CleverLayover comes in first by allowing it to suggest layovers. If you are flexible with your destinations and layover areas then the layover search sites can be beneficial, but if you are looking to specific places and dates, make sure you search the major sites as well!