Find the Cheapest Way to Book Several Trips Together

Booking several trips together means searching for all of your upcoming trips at once and splitting them into tickets that cost less than booking each trip on its own. The flights are the same, only the way they are grouped into tickets changes. The savings can be substantial depending on the routes and the number of trips combined. This article covers how it works and how to search for it.

What is a combined booking?

Say you live in Toronto and have two trips coming up: a week in New York, and Chicago a couple of months later. Booked one after the other, they are two roundtrips:

Searched together, the same flights can be arranged as two multicity tickets that cross each other:

By changing which ticket serves which flight, the total drops from $1,080 to $820. This is only one possible arrangement. The tickets could be split further, or a single ticket could carry three of the flights. The more trips you combine, the more ways there are to cut them into tickets, and the more likely one of them is to beat the sequential bookings. In the example below, three trips are combined into a single booking arrangement:

How can I search several trips at once?

Most flight search engines price one trip at a time, so the arrangements have to be entered by hand: one by one in the multicity search, comparing the totals. With two trips, there are about a dozen ways to cut them into tickets, and prices move daily, so it is tedious to do more than once.

Airglitch has a Multisearch option for this. Select Multisearch in the search form, add each trip with its dates, and the engine tries the arrangements for you. It returns the cheapest combination that covers every flight, with the booking steps for each ticket.

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Multisearch is included in the Plus plan. We also apply other saving strategies in the same search, such as a spare return or a spare multicity serving one of the trips. See our guide to Airglitch saving strategies for the full list.

Is this the same as back-to-back or nested ticketing?

It can be, but those are specific cases. Back-to-back ticketing is two identical roundtrips booked crossed, one of them departing from the destination city, so that each ticket spans a longer stay than either trip. Nested ticketing is the same idea with trips to different places, using multicity tickets instead of roundtrips. Combining trips is about checking every possible arrangement: nested tickets, but also single tickets carrying flights from several trips or one-ways in the mix, and keeping whichever prices lowest.

Are there disadvantages to combining trips?

The main one is bookkeeping. A combined booking means several tickets, each covering parts of different trips, with its own confirmation number, check-in and change rules. Keeping track of which ticket serves which flight takes a little more attention than a single roundtrip, especially a few months in, when the second trip comes around.

The second is commitment: you need to know your next trips ahead of time. For travelers who fly to the same places regularly or plan their trips well in advance, this is rarely a constraint, and combining trips is a particularly effective way to save on flights.

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