Planning a multi-city trip? Make sure to use a cheap-flights hub
If you are lucky enough to have more than two weeks for an upcoming vacation, you are probably thinking of touring around to a number of different cities in one region. Whether it’s checking out 4 or 5 different cities in Europe, or visiting the same number of cities around Southeast Asia, a bit of strategic planning can save you a lot on airfares.
Specifically, if you use a cheap-flights hub city as your main base, you can often travel around the region far more cheaply than you would if you just chose a city at one edge of the local map. Especially if you are booking well in advance, you can often get short flights for almost nothing if you book on low-cost carriers. So the trick is to use the base of these cheap airlines as your own hub, and visit the remaining cities from there.
Europe strategies
Let’s say you want to visit London, Madrid, Athens, and Rome on a 3-week trip to Europe. You might look at a map and decide that you’ll first fly to Athens, and then fly home from London. These sorts of “open-jaw” tickets can look expensive at first, but they can also save you money on your whole trip. However, that ticket might cost you $1,300 or more this summer.
Instead you might get a cheap round-trip in and out of London, for perhaps $800, and use that city as your base. If you book far enough in advance you can often find one-way fares on EasyJet from London to Athens for around $80. You might fly from there to Rome on a one-way ticket on another discount airline for $50, then on to Madrid for another $50, then back to London for as little as $40.
All those flights together cost only a bit over $1,000, and you’ve done the same itinerary. The difference between a round trip into London and doing one section out of a more obscure airport can be huge. The key is to figure out the hub cities for the cheapest regional carriers, and plan your trip around them. In many cases you’ll be using alternative airports, but that’s not a problem when you aren’t changing planes with a quick turn around.
Asia strategies
In a very similar situation, you might want to see Bali, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok on a 3-week trip. There are very cheap flights between all of these cities on Air Asia, which is an excellent airline that is up to international standards. Air Asia is based in Kuala Lumpur, but also uses Bangkok as another hub, and tickets start at around $40 each way if you buy in advance.
So fly from, say, Los Angeles, to Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, and then schedule individual flights on Air Asia to each of the remaining cities. The weather in the tropics is rarely a problem, so long delays and cancelations are rare, meaning that you can even fly from, say, Bali to Kuala Lumpur in the morning, and then from Kuala Lumpur down to Singapore two hours later, without worrying about missing your flight.
The bottom line is it can really help to find the cheap hub cities and buy regional tickets as early as possible, to see everything for the cheapest amount you can get away with.