Dubrovnic flights

You will likely find faster flights by flying first from Dubrovnik to Zagreb, and then continuing on from there. If you are willing to overnight in the city you connect through, the cost—and sometimes even the time—savings can justify overnighting in that city.
You also might take a look at what’s available from Zagreb to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky (CVG) International Airport.
You can check what flights are available at www.Skyscanner.com

Yes, as Kenko suggests! In May 2023 we did just that. Flights home to TO from Dubrovnik were expensive, excessively long with 2 long layovers so we flew to Zagreb with Croatia Air, stayed overnight by the airport to catch our flight home at 8am. After the add’l expenses, we still saved $600 and the flight home was reasonable.

There are no trains in Dubrovnik, so it's either some sort of positioning flight as Kenko
and Marika have discussed, or a bus to get you some place else.

This general issue has been discussed many times in the forum, since Croatia is a
somewhat thin/long country and there are not that many transportation options from
the southern part of the country.

If you don't want to fly to Zagreb (it's worth a night or two), you can fly to Frankfurt
or Munich and be in a Lufthansa/United hub. There are flights back to Chicago or
Dulles from Frankfurt until 5pm, so you could conceivably do DBV-FRA-ORD-CVG in
one (very long) day. Otherwise, you're looking at spending a night in FRA or MUC.

Not knowing your date of travel, I see DBV-FRA-ORD-CIN departing 7:25am from
DBV and arriving CIN 4:52, overall elapsed time 15:27 on Oct 15. Or DBV-EWR-CVG
departing 9:15am arriving 6:45pm, 15:30 travel time. So not sure where you're getting
26+ hours from, and this is all Star Alliance.

My first airline search was directly thru the United website. We will take a look at other options also, but we have some flight miles on United we had hoped to use. Our return flight from Dubrovnik would be around October 28.

Now I understand the situation OP has....

You only searched for flights on the UA website from Dubrovnik to Cincinnati on the exact
date you want to travel, using only miles, wanting the most efficient routing possible.

The constraints you have set are too firm.

First off, if you want to use miles, you need to be inventive and flexible.

Also, it's not clear you have looked at the component schedules that drive the 26 hour+ duration.
It appears that the summer flight schedule (which is much more populated) ends the week before.
The flights out of DBV to a hub appear, with a quick look, to dwindle to Frankfurt, and the daily
nonstop is in the afternoon, so there is no way you can make the connection that day. On top of
that, if you can make the late afternoon connection across the Atlantic, there is most likely no
way to then make a late night connection to Cincinnati.

From my vantage point, your choices are:
- book a one-way flight to Frankfurt with $ and then use your miles to book FRA-CVG the next day
- use your miles for the entire routing and suffer the 26 hour + itinerary
- use $ to buy the entire ticket, in which case you will get optimal routing/timing
- change your schedule to come back the week before, which will get you the routing you want using
miles, since there are more flights. You can fly on the 22nd, for example, for 70k miles with the Newark
1 stop I noted before.

The problem is that if you have already booked the outbound leg with miles, you will quickly
find out that the 1 way itinerary back is extremely expensive, as this is how international fares
work. Which puts you back at the 1st or 2nd option, both of which have the 26 hr+ thing.

Sorry, but that's how it looks to me....

Check flights out of Podgorica. It's about 2 hours from Dubrovnik or make something good out of the problem by spending a night or two at your connection city.

And forget United miles, just book the best flight you can. Best = cost and schedule

I took this trip in 2008 and finding reasonable flights took a lot of effort. Ultimately, I got a decent flight by staying in Dubrovnik two additional days. I found a one-stop flight home that was only available certain days of the week. The first thing you might check is to see if there are better flight options if you stay an additional day or two.

Another option is to buy a one-way ticket from Dubrovnik to another city (e.g., Frankfurt as mentioned above), spend the night in that city, and then fly home from that city. On googleflights you can search DBV to Anywhere for your date of travel and then filter on non-stop flights.

From DBV there are also numerous connections to the U.S. through Frankfurt and Munich.

As mentioned above, we struggled finding a decent connection out of Dubrovnik to DC so we are flying to ZAG and spending the night for a 9am flight home via CDG.

After some research and trial & error we have landed on a return from Dubrovnik to Vienna, where will stay a couple of nights since we have not been there before. Then back home to Louisville thru Newark. We had booked thru Frankfurt, then found that there was an AI event there and hotels where available were outrageous. So you never know where the pitfalls may happen with plans. So looking forward to this trip and seeing Croatia and Slovenia.

Thats excellent and the change of planes opened a new experience for you.

We will be going on the same tour with ours ending October 27th. We fly on Delta and surprise-surprise a Delta flight doesn’t leave back to California until November 1st with a 21 hour and 20 minute layover in Paris. I checked all kinds of ways to go back earlier but all were more expensive than just hanging out and enjoying Dubrovnik and the surrounding area. Thanks to some excellent advise we booked four more nights at the same hotel the tour ends at then the night of October 31st at a place where we can walk to the airport if not raining. On November 1st we leave Dubrovnik at 11:35 and arrive at CDG 2:05. For the night of November 1st I made reservations at a hotel close to the airport that we have stayed at before. Our flight to Seattle then Sacramento leaves CDG at 11:25 on November 2nd.
At first I was a little upset by this long journey home but then I realized it is just another adventure and we will make it be a good time. Blessed to still be able to travel! Enjoy your adventure!

I have a trip to Bosnia in September. I thought I would go down to Dubrovnik (Cavtat actually) afterwards and fly home from there. I have an aquaintance in Dubrovnik that it would nice to see and that was the main excuse. The flight choices out of Dubrovnik were miserable. So I looked at leaving out of Podgorica after a day in Cavtat and there were a number that worked .... but if I am going to Podgorica I need to visit and aquaintance for her mothers's cooking then there are two or three other places I would love to return to and a couple of new ones ....... all of the sudden my 9 days in Bosnia was turning into a 16 day trip ..... so I will just fly home from Sarajevo.