How the planner finds it
- This only runs on the first leg (home to your first city) and the last leg (last city to home), and only when the trip crosses regions.
- Gateways come from a per-region list: New York, Boston, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles and San Francisco in North America; London, Dublin, Reykjavík, Lisbon, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan and Rome in Europe; the equivalents in Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, South America and Africa.
- Each gateway then runs through exactly the same two-ticket machinery as a hub combo: estimate first, price the best candidates live, measure the real gap, assign a real risk level.
- Same-day connections are allowed here — you are catching a long-haul, not spending a day — with a minimum three-hour buffer.
- Unlike a hub combo, a positioning split is only shown when it actually saves money. Paying more to fly a longer way is not a hack, it is a mistake.
- The low-cost transatlantic carriers — Norse, PLAY, French Bee, Level — appear by themselves in the live search from the gateway. There is no separate list of them to maintain.
Worked example
Dallas → Milan, tested through New York
example output- Dallas → New York
- $260 per person
- New York → Milan
- $448 per person
- Two tickets, total
- $708 per person
- Direct Dallas → Milan
- $514 per person
- Shown on the plan?
- No — the direct fare won
This is the honest half of the feature, drawn to show you what losing looks like: gateways priced, the split beaten by the direct fare, nothing shown. An empty section on your plan means the check ran, not that it was skipped.
When it does not work
- Two tickets, so every self-transfer caveat applies: no protection, no through-checked bags, your problem if the hop is late.
- Gateway airports are usually not your home airport. Getting there costs money and hours the fare comparison does not show.
- A same-day positioning hop is tight for an international check-in by nature. It gets the same four-hour floor an ordinary cross-region combo gets, and no less — it used to get three, which was the wrong way round for the combo whose second ticket is the expensive one. An overnight in the gateway is safer still and costs a hotel night.
- It only ever fires on the first and last leg of a trip that crosses regions. Nothing in the middle of Europe is a positioning flight.
- Only one or two candidates get priced live per plan on a standard search budget.
Risk
High risk
Missing a transatlantic flight because the domestic hop was late is the most expensive thing on this page. Build in a night, or do not do it.