How do I minimize total cost of separate flights to the same destination plus optionally accommodation?

Question

My girlfriend and I are currently living in different countries, and meet occasionally for a few days every month or so. We don't really care all that much where we are going, as long as we don't need a visa (we're both in EU), just so we are at the same place and time for a couple of days.

In short:

I'm flying from airport AAA, she's flying from airport BBB, we need to find an airport XXX (not a euphemism!) which is cheapest to fly to overall.

Bonus task: Flights are first and foremost, and we could live with a somewhat more expensive accommodation as long as we can get in and out easily. Since the accommodation cost is comparable to flight cost for such a short stay, we'd like to have some sort of rough idea what we're going to pay for a certain type of accommodation, for example three-star hotel.

Answer 1

While I can't really help with a flight+hotel combo, however, I can suggest flightfox.com (not affiliated, I just compete there) for the flights. You're able to customise your request, so you could potentially ask for people to find you the cheapest double flight (yours and hers) for you to meet up. It'd be an interesting contest at least...just a thought.

Failing that, what I used to do in Europe was to go to Skyscanner and enter London in the source, specify a date, and hit go. It then (by not specifying a destination) shows you the cheapest countries available on those dates.

You can do that for both source places (yours and hers) in two different windows and see where the cheapest destinations match up.

Then head on to booking.com and find a place to stay :)

Answer 2

I found myself in the same situation: my girlfriend is away from me and we try to travel often.

So I've built a tool to search for flights to a common destination:
http://destination.smoogly.ru/

Answer 3

My boyfriend and I are in a long distance relationship and we decided to make a site to help people in this kind of situation: www.tripmatch.org

Enter two departure destinations and it will find you cheap destinations you can both fly to.

Answer 4

I think this might work:

On skyscanner.com, enter AAA to BBB. Skip past the results that have no intermediate stops. The first one that has one or more stops might be your XXX. Repeat the searches from AAA to there and BBB to there to confirm.

Also, click the reversal icon to check from BBB to AAA. Sometimes it gets different routes when going in the opposite direction.

UPDATE: Probably not helpful to the OP three years later, ...

But it just occurred to me that this feature of Azuon might help:

How to see all possible stopovers that connect airports X and Y
Go to advanced mode, create a one-link chain containing two nodes X and Y, each in one row (if Y is unavailable make sure disconnected chains option is active), and then select the row containing X. Then observe the green-colored choice in the checkbox list.

I suspect one could also do an X to Y search on other services and look for which cities appear as layovers in the least expensive routes.

Answer 5

If it's Europe, and

1. no low cost airline flies AAA-BBB
2. there is a low cost airline which has a primary base serving flights to both AAA and BBB

then that will almost surely be the winner.

So look for connections to

1. Dublin (Ryanair)
2. London (everyone and their dog)
3. Oslo (Norwegian)
4. Budapest (wizz)

This manual guessing works better for small airports, obviously.

Answer 6

I think www.skypicker.com is helpful although you'd either need to scrape it or manually match a city. Ie. open the site twice, once from AAA, once from BBB and scan the list carefully.