One important but seldom discussed aspect of international air travel is how to plan for countries where you are only staying for a lay over as you wait for another flight. As I did not know until relatively recently often times when you enter a country even if you are never planning to leave the airport you have to not only go through customs but you must also go through the bag rechecking procedure all over again. While I understand that the reason for this is that it is different countries have not only different lists of contraband but also varying degrees of proficiency at intercepting them, all of this makes it so you can not schedule those flights as you would normal domestic connecting flights. This is not as big of a deal if you are booking a series of flights online say from Boston to Bangkok with a layover in Japan, this is a bigger deal if you have a set departure location and are traveling around a region. For example if you were traveling around Asia but were scheduled to leave out of Tokyo you would want to make sure you gave yourself plenty of extra time to go through customs, recheck your bag and go back through security. Because of all of this, that hour long lay over which would be more than enough time to get to the gate on a normal connecting flight, becomes very risky particularly because each nation and at times airport makes their own rules about how much of the security procedure you have to go back through to make your next flight.
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