What’s the best way to book cheap multi-city flights? – Kiwi.com
Nomad from Kiwi.com is the best multi-city flight search engine around, giving you cheap, flexible travel with options to suit you
Kiwi.com’s Nomad search is the cheapest way to book a multi-city trip. But what does that mean? Well, a multi-city trip is one that combines a number of one-way flights to create an itinerary visiting two or more places.
Normally, that would mean constantly checking prices on hundreds of routes with dozens of carriers yourself — search tabs open, uncertain dates, and so much other information that it just becomes too stressful. With Nomad, all you do is choose your destination cities and date range, and Nomad instantly calculates the cheapest route available. It really is that simple, and it makes Kiwi.com the best site to book multi-city flights.
How to book a multi-city trip in Europe
Choose your destinations
We’ll begin in the Czech Republic (it’s Kiwi.com’s home, after all!), starting our Nomad trip any time in May, and visiting Berlin, Amsterdam, Milan and Paris, before returning to Prague. We’ve specified an overnight stop of one or two nights in each city, so we can get a bit of a feel for each place. Okay? Go Nomad!
Get your itinerary
In a few seconds, we have our itinerary. Leaving Prague on May 27, we fly to Amsterdam. Arriving later that morning, we spend all of Saturday in the Dutch capital, before flying to Berlin where Nomad has given us three nights to see what we can see.
Early evening on Wednesday, May 31 sees a flight to Paris, giving us a day in the City of Lights before heading to Milan. Arriving mid-afternoon, we have three nights in Milan to see the city and its surroundings, before returning to Prague early on the morning of June 4. That’s a tour of some of Europe’s greatest cities in just seven days.
How much does this multi-city trip cost?
Well, that’s five flights in a short period of time with four different airlines…
€187.
Wow.
Depending on variants, that trip can actually cost as little as €134, but the flight times are not quite as accommodating, so that’s a pretty extreme example. Possible, sure, but the trip described above gives you more time to see and do a few things in each city.
So on that note, let’s take things a little easier; let’s give ourselves two weeks, and on a different continent. 14 days, North America.
More inspiration: a multi-city trip in North America
See popular destinations
Let’s take some well-known North American cities: New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, and Washington, DC. A one to four-night stay in each, starting and ending the trip in New York, anytime in April. Go Nomad!
Get your North American itinerary
From New York, we take a 10:40 flight on April 12 to Toronto with Canadian low-cost airline Flair. After three nights there, it’s a lunchtime flight with Porter to D.C. and a stay of four nights, using the days to explore the capital, its museums and its monuments. South to Georgia next, with a two-hour Frontier flight to Atlanta, and after two nights there, we head to the midwest — Chicago — with Frontier again. Tuesday, April 25 brings a JetBlue flight to Boston, and we’ve got four nights to explore beautiful Massachusetts before returning to NYC.
How much does a multi-city trip in North America cost?
Six flights with four airlines over two weeks? $318. Pretty tasty, I think you’ll agree! What’s more, you can book all your flights in one click, for one price, because that’s how Kiwi.com works! This itinerary also includes one of our smart little travel hacks: a Hidden cities ticket.
The Hidden cities travel hack
How can you save money on popular routes?
Some flights in Europe, but particularly in North America, tend to be sold at higher prices when they’re actually part of a longer trip. Many flights from Washington, D.C. to Chicago, for example, are actually part of longer itineraries that continue to Cincinnati, but buying the entire D.C. to Cincinnati trip (hidden by the airline if you search for flights to Chicago on their website) actually costs less than the leg to Chicago on its own. Kiwi.com can pick out and sell you the cheaper Cincinnati flight, and you simply disembark in Chicago rather than completing the trip. In summary, Kiwi.com saves you money with a little trick you won’t see anywhere else!
So there you have it. With Kiwi.com and Nomad, you can create your own personalized trip, all available for one great price and in one click. Check it out for yourself!
FAQs about multi-city flights
What is a multi-city flight?
A multi-city flight isn’t actually just one flight; it’s an itinerary made up of several one-way flights that allows you to visit multiple destinations in one trip.
How do I book multi-city flights?
Booking multi-city flights is now more straightforward than ever. Follow these three simple steps.
1. First, head to Kiwi.com and select either ‘Multi-city’ or ‘Nomad’ from the drop-down menu in the top-left corner of the search box.
- If you select ‘Multi-city’, you’ll get the option to choose your cities in the order that you want to visit them, like so:
- If you select ‘Nomad’, you’ll then choose your cities in any order, to be shuffled according to the cheapest permutation:
2. Once you’ve picked your destinations, specify the length of time you’d like to spend at each one (Nomad) or your departure dates (multi-city), and hit ‘Search’. Our Kiwi-Code will then find the best and cheapest multi-city itineraries that include all those destinations.
3. Select the travel option that suits you best and proceed to checkout.
Nomad vs. multi-city — what’s the difference?
Kiwi.com’s multi-city search feature allows you to put your destinations in a certain sequence, departing from and arriving at each on a concrete date or during a concrete window of dates. This is useful if you need to be in certain places at particular times in a particular order.
Meanwhile, Nomad takes your destinations and shuffles them, creating unique routes based on the most competitive prices. In other words, you get to go to all the places you want to go for the lengths of time you’d like to be there, but Nomad finds the order in which to do it for the best price. This is a feature exclusive to Kiwi.com — it’s great if you’re on a budget, have numerous places on your bucket list, and are more flexible with your travel plans.
@kiwi.com 👒 Tell Nomad which cities you’d like to visit, and within a second or two it’ll find you the cheapest possible way to visit every destination #nomad #travel #wanderlust #nomadlife #travelphotography #vanlife #travelhack ♬ Beat Automotivo Tan Tan Tan Viral – WZ Beat
In this article, we also use ‘multi-city’ as an umbrella term for trips consisting of multiple destinations as this is how it’s used in the wider air travel industry.
What are the benefits of multi-city flights?
The biggest benefit of a multi-city itinerary is that it allows you to see more of the world in one trip, rather than expending your time, money and energy toing and froing between A and B on separate vacations. It’s usually more practical and cost-effective to book one trip consisting of one-way flights than several trips of return flights.
In the past, the main downside of multi-city flights was that they were complicated to book. Someone would need to dedicate a lot of time to seeking multiple routes online, from multiple carriers on multiple travel providers, and piece together an itinerary themselves. This is precisely the pitfall that Kiwi.com tackles — our multi-city and Nomad search options scour the global travel inventory in a matter of seconds to find the best, cheapest flight combinations and permutations.
Is it really cheaper to book a multi-city trip rather than lots of separate one-way flights?
Some websites claim that multi-city flight providers in fact charge more for one itinerary consisting of several one-way flights than the combined value of those flights booked separately. While this is true in some cases, the grounds for this conclusion tend to center around a couple of variables that affect the price of a flight generally: how many people are traveling, or the exact time when the search takes place.
Something else that supports the assertion that multi-city flights are more expensive is that some providers sell more expensive, flexible fares when they’re part of a multi-city itinerary, without necessarily telling you. Rest assured that Kiwi.com doesn’t do this; one-way flights that are part of a multi-city or Nomad itinerary will never be any more expensive than if you searched on our website for each of those flights individually. So, the answer is yes: it’s cheaper and certainly more convenient to book a multi-city flight.
How can I save money on multi-city flights?
Since multi-city itineraries are made up of ordinary one-way flights, you can utilize regular travel hacks to save money on your destination-hopping trips. Here are three of the most important.
- Travel with carry-on baggage only. Skimping on excess luggage is one of the things that’ll save you the most money on flight tickets. Most carriers charge extra for checked baggage at least, and on top of this, some budget airlines even bump up the airfare if you want to take a cabin case onto the plane. If you can fly just with a backpack, you’ll avoid all of these hidden costs.
- Be flexible with your travel dates. Whether you’re searching for one-way, return, multi-city or Nomad flights, Kiwi.com’s interface makes it easy to see — on a calendar — when exactly the cheapest flights will fly. The more free and flexible you can be with your plans, the better your chance of securing the very cheapest travel deals.
- Consider ground transport. Especially if you’re looking at a multi-city trip in somewhere like Europe where a lot of popular destinations are relatively close together, it might be cheaper to take the odd bus or train instead of a flight. Fortunately, Kiwi.com can take this into account with its multimodal search filter. Click here to read more about how it works.
For more general pointers on how to get the cheapest flights from Kiwi.com, check out these eight tips.
All prices correct at time of publication
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