Need the Best flight and hotel search tools for multi-destination trips? Discover platforms that make complex travel booking very simple.

Alright, let me tell you about figuring out the whole multi-destination trip planning thing. It wasn’t exactly straightforward the first time I tried to string together, like, three different cities in one go. I started off like most people probably do, just opening a bunch of browser tabs.

Seriously, I had one tab for flights from City A to City B, another for City B to City C, then another for C back home. Then I’d open separate tabs for hotels in City A, City B, and City C. It got messy real fast. I was trying to juggle dates, flight times, layovers, hotel check-ins… my brain felt like scrambled eggs. I’d find a good flight, then the hotel I wanted for those dates was booked, or ridiculously expensive. Back to square one. Wasted a good chunk of time just clicking back and forth, losing track of which price was for what.

Finding Better Ways – Flights First

I figured there had to be a better way. So, I started searching specifically for “multi city flight search” or “multiple destination trip planner”. The usual suspects popped up.

• Google Flights: I gave their multi-city tool a proper go. Punched in my destinations and rough dates. It’s pretty good for getting a ballpark figure and seeing major airline options. Easy interface, you know? I could see the price impact of shifting dates slightly. That was helpful. But sometimes, it didn’t show the smaller budget airlines, especially for intra-Europe or Asia routes.
• Skyscanner: I tried Skyscanner next, using their multi-city search feature too. It felt like it pulled from a wider range of airlines, including some of the budget carriers Google sometimes missed. The downside? Sometimes the connections it suggested were wild, like super long layovers or changing airports. You really have to check the details.
• Momondo/Kayak: Used these as well, kind of as a third opinion. Sometimes they’d find a slightly different combination or price. It’s like comparison shopping for anything else, you gotta check a few places.

What I ended up doing for flights was using Google Flights to get the basic structure and dates locked down with major carriers, then double-checking on Skyscanner for any cheaper budget airline options for specific legs. Sometimes booking separate one-way tickets on budget airlines was way cheaper than the package deal the big search engines found. More work? Yeah, a bit. But saved me some cash.

Sorting Out the Hotels

Okay, flights kinda sorted, then came the hotels for each stop. This felt a bit more fragmented.

• * / Agoda: These are my usual go-to’s anyway. I basically just did separate searches for each city within their platforms. The map view was super important here. I needed places reasonably close to transit or the stuff I wanted to see in each city. I spent a lot of time zooming in on maps, checking locations relative to train stations or airports.
• Hotel Chain Sites: If I had points or preferred a specific chain, I’d check their direct website too. Sometimes they have member rates that aggregators don’t show.
• Airbnb: For longer stays in one city, I checked Airbnb. Sometimes having a kitchen is nice, you know? But for short hops, hotels often felt easier logistically.

The main challenge here wasn’t finding hotels, but organizing the options. Prices change, availability disappears. What worked best for me was pretty low-tech:

I literally made a simple list or spreadsheet. Columns for: City, Check-in Date, Check-out Date, Flight Arriving (Time/Info), Flight Departing (Time/Info), Hotel Option 1 (Name, Price, Link/Ref), Hotel Option 2 (Name, Price, Link/Ref), Notes (e.g., ‘near metro’, ‘free breakfast’).

Putting It All Together

So, there wasn’t one magic tool that did everything perfectly for me. It was more about using a couple of tools for their strengths and then organizing the information myself.

My process ended up looking like this:

1. Rough itinerary draft (Cities, general order).
2. Use Google Flights multi-city for initial flight structure & price estimate.
3. Use Skyscanner multi-city to refine flights, check budget options, maybe find cheaper legs.
4. Check budget airlines directly if needed for specific short hops.
5. Once flight dates/times were kinda firm, search */Agoda for hotels in each city using the map view heavily.
6. Check direct hotel sites or Airbnb if applicable.
7. Dump all potential flight and hotel combos (with prices and key details) into my simple spreadsheet or notes app.
8. Compare options side-by-side in my notes. See how flight times match hotel check-ins.
9. Tweak the itinerary slightly if needed (maybe stay an extra day somewhere if hotels are much cheaper, or adjust flight times).
10. Book everything! Often booked flights directly with airlines if prices were similar, and hotels via * just because I found their confirmation management easiest for multiple bookings.

It’s still a bit of manual work, stitching it all together. But using the flight aggregators to do the heavy lifting on finding route options, and then a hotel aggregator with a good map view, combined with my own simple notes – that’s what got the job done without driving me completely crazy. Flexibility is key too; being willing to adjust dates or even the order of cities based on prices makes a huge difference.