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My girlfriend and I are living apart for a few months due to work. However my sister is having a wedding in September in the UK that we're both going to. I'm trying to find flights where we can meet somewhere in the continent of America and fly to Europe together (she's terrified of flying - particularly over water!).
I'm finding this an incredibly involved and complicated process. Is there any kind of site out there that can help me find flights - or am I stuck doing this manually?
If you search for MXO-LON connections, you will notice that there is a preference towards 1-stop flights with change in ATL, generally with a carrier change, i.e. 2 separate tickets per person. (The direct flight with British Airways is even more expensive than a 2-carrier flight it seems.)
Because you already have "paid the multi-ticket penalty", you might as well use it to the fullest and nudge the search engine to use a different stopover location (JFK) — there is not much variance in overall cost.
So, with the result from the search engine, just go to each carrier's webpage and do the single bookings according to the itinerary. Do it in reverse order (first JFK-LON-JFK for 2 persons, then MXO-JFK-MXO for 1 person), so that, should some odd problem during booking arise, there is still the possibility to add an extra day with hotel, without being late at the destination.
My boyfriend and I are in a long distance relationship and we decided to make a site to help people find flights from two different departure airports to a common destination: www.tripmatch.org
Enter two departure destinations and it will find you cheap destinations you can both fly to.
Our site is still in beta and it works best for finding destinations in Europe at the moment, but please leave us some feedback! If enough people like the idea, we will continue to develop it and add more features.
Honestly, aside from an answer like "flight booking engines" which you've looked at, there's not much else you could do. You can, for example, on kayak.com, enter in the source airport as "MEX,BOS" to see flights from either, but it's not going to show you two heads connecting into one, it'll simply show you the cheapest from one of them, whichever that is. However that might help you get an idea of what's available.
Otherwise, I'd suggest flightfox (they're a paid service, but there's a discount code in my profile) - disclosure, I occasionally compete on there as one of their 'experts'. This way you could specify that you're looking for flights from MEX->LON AND BOS->LON with a connection state-side, and they could find it for you. Don't worry that it sounds like a complex flight, they often deal with more complex than that, and they may also find cheaper flights than you've found so far. Just a thought.
Why not get your girlfriend to fly to Boston - Aeromexico do a direct flight - and meet her at Logan? In September, that flight arrives at 9:35pm, so you could get the 10:40pm British Airways flight to London that same evening. However, 55 minutes to change planes is quite tight, so if you would prefer more time for the changeover, she could get the same flight the day before and you could have the day together in Boston.
Edit: Sorry, only just noticed the date was 3 years ago! Not sure why it showed up at the top of the travel list.
I've worked on a solution for planning flights for meeting up. It is offered as a part of PanFlights, a flexible multi-modal travel search engine.
You can check it out at https://panflights.com/meet
I wrote an article regarding how you can get the most of it here.
A similar question is here, there's more information. Find the top k cheapest airports to meet for two people departing from different airports
