One Stop or Nonstop: When a Connection Is the Better Ticket

A quarter of the passengers departing Heathrow in 2025 were connecting, against 5 per cent at Gatwick. What that means for your itinerary, and why the cheapest connecting itinerary is often two separate tickets that carry no right to care.

By Muhammad MehdiPublished 3 October 2026· Updated 3 October 2026· 6 min read

One Stop or Nonstop: When a Connection Is the Better Ticket

Sponsored by FlyraGo, a flight, hotel, eSIM and car rental comparison service. FlyraGo supported the research and had no role in the findings; every source and number below is checked to the publication's own standard.

A quarter of the people flying out of Heathrow are not going anywhere near Heathrow. The Civil Aviation Authority's 2025 Departing Passenger Survey found that 26 per cent of departing passengers at Heathrow were connecting at the airport. At Gatwick the figure was 5 per cent and at Stansted 3 per cent.

The London Assembly Research Unit, drawing on Department for Transport data for 2023, measured the same thing slightly differently and got a similar answer: Heathrow 27 per cent transfer passengers, Gatwick 7 per cent, Stansted 5 per cent and Luton 4 per cent. Two independent datasets, two years apart, agreeing closely.

That share is the structural reason connecting itineraries exist. It is also, in one specific and expensive respect, a trap, and the trap is legal rather than practical.

Why the connection exists at all

A hub is not a place flights go to be inconvenient. It is a mechanism for combining passengers: a widebody arriving from Tokyo and one arriving from Los Angeles are separately unviable on a thin route from London, and viable together. The 26 per cent connecting share at Heathrow is the visible evidence that this combining happens at a scale no individual schedule reveals.

The direction of travel is worth noting. Heathrow's transfer share fell ten percentage points over the decade to 2023, from 37 per cent in 2013 to 27 per cent, before rising two points between 2022 and 2023. A Heathrow that connects a smaller share of its passengers is one whose routes terminate where they started, which is why a search at Heathrow returns more itineraries that begin and end at a London airport.

For a traveller the practical consequence is simple. Gatwick and Stansted are almost entirely point to point airports, so an itinerary that needs a connection is usually a Heathrow itinerary, and the number of onward services available on any given day is a function of how much connecting traffic the airport carries.

One ticket and two tickets are not the same product

This is the distinction that matters, and the Civil Aviation Authority draws it explicitly.

Where your booking includes two or more flights on a single reservation, your right to care and your right to compensation are based on the distance between the first and last airport in your booking. If you miss the connection because of a delay to the first flight, the airline remains responsible for getting you onward, including accommodation if you have to wait overnight. And if the onward flight is delayed by more than five hours, you can take a refund for the unused portion of the ticket and abandon the journey, with the airline still responsible for arranging to get you back to your original departure point.

Where your journey is a self-transfer, meaning two or more separate bookings, the position changes entirely. The CAA states that you do not have a statutory right to care, compensation or transport to your last destination if delays mean you miss a flight. The entitlements that apply to each individual flight still apply. Everything covering the gap between them does not.

Read that last sentence carefully, because it is where the cost sits. Each individual flight has the rights described in the previous guide: care after a threshold delay, fixed compensation for arriving more than three hours late, a refund after five hours. None of them helps you if you are standing at a connection point having missed the second flight, because you have arrived at that flight's origin on time as far as that flight is concerned. You are not late. You are simply somewhere you were supposed to be already.

How your compensation is calculated across a connection

There is a second rule in the same section of the CAA guidance that is easy to miss. Where your booking contains more than one flight, care and compensation depend on the distance between the first and last airport, and late arrivals at your connection destination are not taken into account for the purposes of compensation.

The consequence is that a long-haul itinerary's compensation is set by the total distance of the journey, not by the leg that went wrong, and a delay that costs you four hours at the connection but still delivers you within three hours of your final destination earns nothing. That design is deliberate in the regulation, and it has the effect of placing the threshold where the passenger's day is actually ruined, rather than at the point of inconvenience.

It also means the thresholds are larger for a through booking than a single flight of the last leg would suggest. A London to Sydney itinerary is measured over more than 3,500 km, so it lands in the band that pays 260 or 520 pounds, not in a shorter flight's band.

Why the cheapest connection is often the unsafe one

Nothing in the fare structure requires the cheapest itinerary to be a single booking. Booking sites and metasearch engines routinely assemble an itinerary from two separate reservations because the two components are sold by different airlines and priced independently. The saving is real and it is usually the largest on the page.

The calculation behind it is that you are being paid to absorb a risk, and the risk has a defined legal value. If the first flight is delayed and you miss the second, you buy the replacement yourself, you lose the connection's onward options, and where the delay strands you overnight you have no entitlement to a hotel. On a route where the two flights are separate carriers, there may not even be a duty of care between them.

The counterweight is that the single booking is not automatically better. A connection on one ticket with a short layover protects you legally but not practically, because protection you have to claim after the fact is not the same as a four hour buffer. Where a through booking requires a genuinely tight change at a busy hub, the protection is real but the probability of needing it is high.

Choosing between them

Start from whether the itinerary is one reservation or two, because that single fact changes the legal position more than any other variable in the comparison. If the connection is sold as one booking, you have the rights described above and the question is how comfortable you are with the layover length. If it is sold as separate bookings, price the risk rather than the fare, and a generous layover or a route with an overnight alternative may be worth more than the saving.

Second, compare total elapsed time rather than number of stops. A connection through a well connected hub can beat a nonstop that departs at an awkward hour, and the reverse is true of a nonstop arriving at a time that makes onward travel impossible.

Third, price the buffer against the loss. The cost of a hotel night and a replacement domestic flight is usually larger than the difference between the cheapest connection and the next one, and it is a cost the law will not reimburse on a self-transfer.

Where the comparison needs doing properly across both nonstop and connecting options, FlyraGo, which supported the research behind this guide, compares airlines and travel agencies on the same route and dates so that one stop and nonstop itineraries appear together rather than in separate tabs.

What these figures cannot tell you

The connecting shares are annual averages across all passengers, so they do not show which routes carry the connecting traffic or how a specific itinerary's onward options compare. Heathrow's 26 per cent tells you that connections are available in volume, not that one exists for your destination on your date.

The rights described here apply to flights covered by UK261. The Department for Transport's travel guide limits that to flights departing from a UK airport on any airline, arriving at a UK airport on an EU or UK airline, or arriving at an EU airport on a UK airline. A self-transfer made entirely outside that scope has none of these protections regardless of how it was ticketed.

Frequently asked questions

Are separate tickets riskier than one booking?

Yes, and the difference is legal rather than practical. The Civil Aviation Authority states that if your journey includes two or more separate flight bookings, sometimes called a self-transfer, you do not have a statutory right to care, compensation or transport to your last destination if delays mean that you miss a flight. The entitlements that apply to each individual flight still apply, but nothing covers the gap between them.

Can I claim compensation if I miss a connecting flight on one booking?

If both flights are on a single booking, yes. The Civil Aviation Authority states that where your booking includes two or more flights, your right to care and compensation are based on the distance between the first and last airport in your booking. It also states that late arrivals at your connection destination are not taken into account for the purposes of compensation, so only the delay that affects your final arrival counts.

How much connecting traffic does Heathrow handle?

A quarter of it. The Civil Aviation Authority's 2025 Departing Passenger Survey found that 26 per cent of passengers departing Heathrow were connecting at that airport, against 5 per cent at Gatwick and 3 per cent at Stansted. The London Assembly Research Unit, using Department for Transport data for 2023, put Heathrow's transfer share at 27 per cent against 7 per cent at Gatwick, 5 per cent at Stansted and 4 per cent at Luton.

What happens if a connecting flight is delayed by more than five hours?

The Civil Aviation Authority states that if your connecting flight is delayed by over five hours, you can choose a refund for the unused portion of your ticket and abandon your journey, and that the airline will still be responsible for arranging to get you back to your original departure point. On a single booking. The same right does not attach to a self-transfer itinerary booked as separate reservations.

Do airlines route through hubs because there is no direct flight?

Frequently, yes. A hub exists so that passengers arriving on different services can be combined onto the same onward aircraft, which is what makes a thin city pair viable at all. The Civil Aviation Authority's connecting figures show how concentrated that traffic is: Heathrow's share of connecting passengers has fallen ten percentage points from 37 per cent in 2013 to 27 per cent in 2023, though it rose two points between 2022 and 2023. Where a city pair is served by a hub connection, the alternative is usually no service at all rather than a slower one.

Sources

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