Even if you knew exactly where you wanted to go along with exact dates, it would still take at least a full day, usually more, to be able to price and book your flights for a multi-stop trip.
What if you could do it in less than 30 minutes?
From the initial search to booking, assuming you know the route you want to take before you start, you can search, tweak, change, and find the perfect trip for your situation in under a half hour.
Let’s look at two some sample multi-stop routes:
Save time and money
The first route we looked at was a 6 month, 11-stop trip (8 flights, 3 overland segments).
- New York > Rome >overland> Athens > Cairo > Mumbai > Kathmandu > Bangkok >overland> Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) > Auckland > Lima >overland> Cusco > New York
Using Indie to search this route, we entered all destinations and dates and got an immediate, bookable price, all online.
- The initial price was $4669, all taxes and fees included (Note: In order to get an immediate, bookable price on your trip, you must be be a BootsnAll Member, which is totally free!).
- The total travel time for this trip (8 flights) was 92 hours.
After the initial search, it’s possible to customize each leg by by clicking the blue edit button next to each flight on the screenshot above. You can then make dates flexible by searching the 3 days before and after it, then sort by things like price, number of stops, travel time, airline, and departure and arrival times.
You can change any of the selected flights to fit you needs.
After spending 11 minutes looking at each individual flight, I was able to lower the price to $4243, a $426 savings!
Who likes layovers anyway?
Most travelers like to minimize layovers as much as possible. For this example, we wanted to see how much more it would cost, utilizing Indie’s flexible dates search and flight availability picker, to travel on all nonstop flights, as long as it was affordable (meaning we were willing to pay a bit extra, but we didn’t want to add 30-50% to the overall price).
The second route we looked at is a 3-month summer trip around the world, with 8 flights.
- Los Angeles > Auckland > Sydney > Bangkok > Delhi > Istanbul > Paris > New York City > Los Angeles
Here are the initial details after my first search for this route on Indie:
- The initial price was $2735USD, all taxes and fees included.
- The total travel time for all 8 flights was 89 hours, 35 minutes. 4 out of the 8 flights on the initial search were nonstop.
- The average price of flights came out to $342/flight – not bad considering nearly every flight was international and there are a few long-haul ones in there.
Though the price was good, our goal this time was to get as many nonstop flights as we could without significantly increasing the cost of the trip.
This took a bit more time than the first example, as we spent about 20 minutes tinkering with the options.
But in the end, we were able to obtain nonstop flights for all 8 legs of the trip and cut out over 44 hours of travel time!
The cost did increase from $2735 to $2999, a $264 (or 9.7%) increase in the total cost. But cutting out nearly two entire days of plane travel, and not having any layovers, is probably worth a couple hundred bucks to a lot of travelers.
What did we learn?
The real value with Indie comes with the flexibility and possibility to cater to each traveler’s specific needs and be able to do it all online in as little time as possible.
Obviously all routes are going to be different, and all travelers’ wants and needs are going to be different. Some want the absolute lowest price possible. Some want to spend as little time in the air and in airports as possible. Some want to fly on certain airlines to build points. Some want to fly business class.
The key is that all those options are possible when using the flexible dates feature and flight picker.
Photo credits: 06photo