What Is a Multi-City Flight?

What is a multi-city flight?

A multi-city flight is a single airline booking that strings together several flight segments to different cities, rather than the simple out-and-back of a round trip. On one ticket, you might fly from your home city to a first destination, then later from that destination to a second one, and finally back home, or any similar sequence of stops. This lets you build a trip that visits multiple places without booking each leg as a separate ticket. Airlines and booking sites offer a multi-city option in their search tools specifically for this. Multi-city routing is ideal for complex itineraries, and because everything is on one ticket, the connections between your chosen cities are part of a single, coordinated booking.

How do you book a multi-city flight?

Booking is done through the multi-city option on an airline's website or a flight search engine, rather than the default round-trip or one-way search. You select multi-city, then enter each flight segment, or leg, of your trip separately, specifying the departure city, arrival city, and date for each. For example, you might add New York to London on one date, London to Rome on another, and Rome to New York on a third. The tool then finds fares for the whole itinerary as a single booking. You can usually add several legs. Because the routing is custom, it pays to experiment with the order and dates of your legs, since different combinations can change the price significantly on a multi-city ticket.

Why book a multi-city flight?

The main reason is to visit more than one destination efficiently on a single ticket. If you want to see several cities on one trip, a multi-city booking lets you fly between them without separate round trips or backtracking home. It is also the way to book an open-jaw trip, where you fly into one city and out of another, which is perfect for itineraries like landing in one country and departing from another after traveling overland between them. Multi-city fares can sometimes be cheaper or more convenient than piecing together separate tickets, and keeping everything on one booking means the airline coordinates your itinerary. For anything beyond a simple there-and-back trip, multi-city is often the smart choice.

How does a multi-city flight compare to round-trip and open-jaw?

These terms describe different routing shapes. A round trip flies you from home to one destination and back to home from that same destination, the simplest pattern. A multi-city flight includes multiple stops or segments on one booking, covering any custom sequence of cities. An open-jaw is a specific kind of multi-city trip where you fly into one city and return home from a different city, leaving a gap you cover by other means, like a train or another flight; the name comes from the open shape of the route. So an open-jaw is essentially a type of multi-city booking. Choose a round trip for a single destination, and multi-city, including open-jaw, when your trip involves more than one city or asymmetric routing.