How to find the cheapest order for a multi-city trip

A fare between two cities is not the same in both directions or on every day. Which airlines fly a route, and which of them are budget carriers, decides what it costs, and the flight home from your last city is often the biggest single price on the trip. Change the order and every one of those legs changes with it: London to Paris to Rome is three different flights from Rome to Paris to London.

Two things move the total most. The first and last legs, the long flights from and back to home, differ the most between orders; ending in a city with cheap flights home can be worth more than everything else. And in Europe and Japan a train can beat the plane on the shorter legs, which changes which order is cheapest once trains are counted too.

For cities you can see in any order, starting and ending at home:

• 2 cities: 2 orders
• 3 cities: 6 orders
• 4 cities: 24 orders
• 5 cities: 120 orders
• 6 cities: 720 orders
• 7 cities: 5,040 orders

Each order can then fly on different days, and the cheapest day for one flight is rarely the cheapest day for the whole trip. Three cities is six searches by hand; five is 120, before any dates move.

For two or three cities this is quick enough. Write down your home airport, the cities, and roughly how many nights in each. Then, for each order, price the trip on Google Flights: in Google’s words a multi-city search lets you “choose a flight for each part of your trip,” one row per flight with its own date. Price the same order as separate one-way tickets too, and try moving each date a day or two either side. Keep a running total per order; the lowest total is your order.

Past four cities the number of orders makes this impractical, and that is what the tools below are for.

Stopover (ours). You give a home airport, up to 7 cities, a window of dates and a range of nights per city. It prices every order on dates that fit together, recommends one, shows the orders that came close and what each would cost, and prices a train or bus where it beats the plane. It does not sell tickets; each leg links to where you book it. Free, no account needed for up to 3 trips a day. Try New York to London, Paris, Rome and Barcelona.

Kiwi.com Nomad. Kiwi.com describes it as letting you “input multiple destinations and your desired duration of stay in each of them, before it calculates the cheapest possible route,” and you book on Kiwi.com.

PanFlights, Optimized tour. Its page says that when “the city order, the travel dates, and even which cities to visit” are not important, “PanFlights calculates route suggestions for you,” and that bookings happen on external sites through its links.

KAYAK Trip Builder still comes up in answers to this question, but we could not find it on KAYAK on November 11, 2026; what happened to it. The side by side of these tools is on the Kiwi Nomad alternatives page.

For every trip in the study, the price of the order the person typed against the cheapest order Stopover found for the same cities and dates. By the number of cities:

• 2 cities: 42% of 81 trips typed a pricier order, by a median of $83 a person.
• 3 cities: 72% of 43 trips typed a pricier order, by a median of $109 a person.
• 4 cities: 67% of 49 trips typed a pricier order, by a median of $121 a person.
• 5 or more cities: 71% of 45 trips typed a pricier order, by a median of $215 a person.

The largest gap was $924 a person. The method, every trip and a downloadable data file are in the Order Tax study.