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The cheapest order to visit cities on a multi-city trip

By Yauheni Malashchytski · · 6 min read

There’s no fixed rule like “go clockwise”. On low-cost airlines each flight is priced on its own, so the order of your cities and the day you fly each leg both change the total. Price whole routes, not single flights. In my search, the same five cities cost €262 to €414 depending on order and dates.

Why the order changes the price

Budget airlines in Europe sell one-way fares. A flight from Paris to Lisbon has its own price on each day, and the flight in the other direction has a different one. Change the order of your cities and you’re buying a different set of flights.

The dates move with the order. If you stay four nights in Lisbon instead of three, every flight after Lisbon leaves a day later, and each of those flights has a new price.

That makes the number of options grow fast. With a fixed start and finish, four cities can be visited in 24 orders, five cities in 120, six in 720. Each order then has its own set of possible dates. Nobody checks that by hand. The shortcut is to book the cheapest first flight and hope the rest works out, and that’s how a bargain first leg locks you into an expensive trip.

Why I cared about this

I had a one-month visa and a long list of places I had never seen. I wanted to fit in as many of them as I could without overspending, and the flights were only part of it.

Two things annoyed me more than any fare. The first was paying for the same night twice: when a flight lands after midnight, you pay for a hotel night in the new city while the night in the old one is already paid for.

The second was a 6 a.m. departure, which means a 3:30 alarm, or not sleeping at all. A route that’s €10 cheaper but costs me a night of sleep isn’t cheaper to me.

So when I say “cheapest order”, I mean the order and dates where the whole trip costs least, and where the flight times leave you able to enjoy the place you paid to see.

How to find the cheapest order, step by step

1. Fix only what you can’t change

Write down where you start, where you could finish, the window you can travel in, and the cities you want to see. Keep the finish open if you can. Each leg is priced on its own, so finishing somewhere else carries no penalty and gives you more routes to compare.

2. Give each city a range of nights, not a number

“Three to six nights in Rome” gives the search room to move a flight off an expensive day. A fixed “four nights everywhere” forces every leg onto one date.

3. Let the order float

Don’t draw the route on a map first. A neat geographic loop is a good guess, but it’s only a guess. The real answer depends on which flights run on which days and what they cost.

4. Count the costs that aren’t on the ticket

A midnight landing costs you a hotel night. A pre-dawn start costs you sleep. Add those to the fare when you compare routes.

5. Decide what a better schedule is worth

The cheapest fares and the best schedule aren’t always the same route. Decide in advance whether you’d pay a little more for daytime flights. In my example below, the better schedule cost €9 more for the whole trip.

A real example: five cities in one month

On 5 October 2026 I ran this search on ffly’s free web search:

  • Start and finish: Warsaw
  • Cities: Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Athens
  • Window: 2 November to 1 December 2026
  • Nights: 3 to 6 in each city
  • Priority: Best schedule

It compared 567 fares across the 30 days of the window and found 8 routes through all five cities. The flights for the same five cities ranged from €261.76 to €414.42, so the most expensive route cost 58% more than the cheapest.

The top route was Warsaw, then Paris for 5 nights, Lisbon for 4, Barcelona for 3, Rome for 6, Athens for 3, and back to Warsaw. Its flights came to €270.94.

That isn’t the cheapest fare on the list. One route was €9.18 cheaper, but it ranked lower on schedule, so the top pick traded a few euros for better flight times. Even so, the top route still loses about 4 hours of sleep across the trip, which is the kind of thing I want to see before I book.

Two caveats. Fares were checked on that day, and some airlines’ fares were missing from that search, so a run on another day could find cheaper legs. Treat it as one result. Your trip and dates will give different numbers.

Doing it by hand

You can do this with any flight search. It takes time. Multi-city search forms ask you to type each leg, so you choose the order before you see a single price. To compare orders, you repeat the search for each one, then shift the dates and repeat again.

Airline tools don’t solve it either. Ryanair’s MultiCity booking is mostly a convenience and not usually cheaper than booking the flights separately, according to Irish Travel Addict’s guide. WIZZ Link combines Wizz Air flights into one self-transfer journey, with ConnectSure by Dohop to help if a delay makes you miss the second flight. Both work within one airline, so they can’t mix the cheapest legs from different airlines.

If you book separate flights, leave a buffer between them. On separate bookings, a missed connection is yours to sort out and pay for. I go into that in multi-city vs one-way tickets.

How ffly does it

I built ffly, a multi-city trip planner, for exactly this. You pick the cities you want to see, your travel window and a range of nights for each city. ffly compares orders and dates for the whole trip and ranks the routes by what matters most to you: Best schedule, Balanced or Cheapest. It favours sensible flight times over pre-dawn starts, and counts a midnight landing as the hotel night it costs you. You then book each flight on the airline’s site or a booking site.

Fares come from Ryanair, Wizz Air, airBaltic, Volotea and more. To see how your own cities line up, try a search free on the web. The iPhone app gives you 3 searches free.

FAQ

Does the order you visit cities change the price of flights?

Yes, on low-cost airlines it usually does. Each leg is priced on its own and each direction has its own fare, so a different order means a different set of flights on different days. In my five-city search, the order and dates moved the total from €262 to €414.

How many possible orders are there for several cities?

With a fixed start and finish, it’s the factorial of the number of cities: 24 orders for 4 cities, 120 for 5 and 720 for 6. Each order then has its own possible dates, which is why checking them by hand takes so long.

Is it cheaper to fly into one city and out of another?

It can be. Low-cost airlines price one-way, so there’s no penalty for finishing somewhere else, and the cheapest last leg may not go back to where you started. Keep the finish open if your plans allow it.

How many nights should I spend in each city?

Give each city a range rather than a fixed number, for example three to five nights. A range lets the cheapest days win without changing the shape of your trip much.

Is it better to book a multi-city ticket or separate one-way flights?

For low-cost trips in Europe you’ll almost always book separate one-way flights, and the order and dates matter more than the ticket type. The trade-offs are covered in multi-city vs one-way tickets.

Key takeaways

  • On low-cost airlines the order of your cities and the day of each flight both change the total price.
  • Five cities with a fixed start and finish can be visited in 120 orders before dates are even considered.
  • In a real search on 5 October 2026, the same five cities cost from €262 to €414 in flights, depending on order and dates.
  • A midnight landing costs a hotel night and a pre-dawn flight costs sleep, so compare routes with those included.
  • Give each city a range of nights and keep the finish open to give cheaper days room to win.