Multi City Flights

Multi-City search/stop routes() - JAL International Flights

This function displays the cheapest available fare for the route, fare and category you have chosen. You can use this function to find trip routes as follows. Please do not type the name of the transiting airport/city into the target box if your route involves 24 -hour transits. In alphabetical order, please type in the city name.

It is not possible to specify the place of transfer.

Search for a city flight

You are not looking for a round-trip, and if you enter your multi-town travel route, the fares you find will probably not look like the round-trip fares. Many multi-city flights, especially those without data flexibility, often bundle a number of high one-way fares into a single packet of fares that surpass return fares for similar routes.

However, an inexperienced pilot who knows how and where to look for the best fares can overcome the multi-city route bane. Where should you look for your multi-city flights? To see how they develop in multi-city air travel research, we tried five different websites: the Expedia and Priceline reservation websites and the rate generators Kayak, Momondo and TripAdvisor (our mother company).

Each location on this easy route was tried with the same travel times over a 2 weeks stay in September. Both the lowest total cost and the best fares for a journey where each stage included a non-stop one. Lowest Price: $895 for Kayak, Momondo and TripAdvisor for an Air New Zealand outing.

The irony is that the rates for kayak and TripAdvisor were obtained from Expedia - but our first Expedia quest didn't show that they were. Lowest non-stop route price: $990 on Expedia for flights with American and Qantas. The Priceline was the clear winner, with higher pricing on non-stop and one-stop routes than the other locations.

Meanwhile, Expedia had the least user-friendly surface. The other pages, after we had arranged a first date of our first trip on September 1st, the calendars for each further stage of the trip changed to September - in contrast to Expedia, which always let us click through all the intermediate month.

The Expedia also missed to fill the second stage downhill city with the last stage destination - a small comfort that all other locations provided. The route we took was a little more complex to be the object of our next test, and we found significant differences in tariffs and timetables, with the Expedia and Priceline aggregators easily beat for the best deals.

Lowest price: $791 for a "hacker fare" in a kayak (this kind of tariff includes reservation of one-way flights on several websites). The route included three different airlines: Lowest possible cost for a non-stop route: Kayaking also won here with another $896 for hackers, this with Finnair, British Airways and Ryanair.

Momondo offered the next best non-stop rate - $961 - for a British Airways route that can be booked through a website named Payless Flights. TravelAdvisor was within call of the other two aggregateers with an offer of $1,015 for non-stop flights aboard British Airways and Iberia, but Expedia and Priceline did not go well (pun intended).

Priceline found no uninterrupted travel routes, while Expedia's bottom rate was an astounding $2,284. It may seem like an uncommon route, but we wanted to test big towns flown to by low-cost carriers to see how reservation machines evolve. It turned out that the best balance of prize and route was a heritage carriers.

Lowest price: Kayaking came with a $474 chipper rate that outperformed the other locations, but provided a less than perfect route - think of stops at each stage - on Delta and Frontier. Lowest possible cost for a non-stop route: The kayak undercuts the competition with a $527 rate for non-stop flights on United.

Others found the same route but quoted higher rates ($563 on Momondo, $570 on Priceline and $571 on Expedia and TripAdvisor). Kayaking was able to lower its cost by combining several one-way flights that would have to be purchased seperately on the United website - a cost that might be worthwhile for travellers who want to make a few dollars savings.

Neither of the reservation pages or aggregate pages includes Southwest tariffs in their results (because Southwest has decided to make its tariffs available only on its own website). Unfortunately, Southwest's website isn't very kind to looking for multi-town flights, but we did cobble together four one-way flights and got a grand prize of $565 - in line with United's rates.

This shows that low cost carriers are always good for review, but in the end may not be the least expensive one. Whilst the reservation machines and aggregate websites can facilitate the challenging task of reserving a multi-city journey, the fact is that you cannot become dependent on just one website to complete your entire journey reservation or research.

In simple tours you may find that most places offer you more or less the same rates, but the more towns you choose, the more variations you will find in both rate and time. As well as the five websites we've tried, you can also consider finding Skyscanner, WhichBudget, Google Flights and more.

Some of their rates may not be included on the major reservation pages, so you may need to go to their specific web pages to find offers. Consider also cheaper alternatives (such as train, bus or rented car) to get you on your route between neighbouring towns and avoid needless airfare.

According to the route, a round-the-world flight ticketing or a local airline passport may be a more economic alternative than point-to-point ticketing. Hints to the pages of the aggregator: This site searches the rates on the Internet and then guides you to affiliates who make your real reservation. They will not always recognise the name of these affiliate pages (on Momondo these are name like SkyTours, SkyPicker, GoTravel123 and PaylessFlights).

You are strongly advised to do your research before making a reservation with a business you do not know; look for Better Business Bureau grievances or ratings from other travellers.