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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?

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    Could you be more specific? Which cities are you each flying from? Do you mind hanging around in the intermediate city for hours for her?
    – Mark Mayo
    Jul 1, 2013 at 2:28
  • I'm pretty flexible. In this case she's going to be working (and traveling) from Mexico City. I'm from Boston but can get to pretty much any airport in the New England/New York area. I'm definitely prepared to wait for her if it means her not having to cross the Atlantic by herself! Jul 1, 2013 at 2:37
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    Disagree about the duplicate. In the other question, the destination is open. Here the destination is fixed, but the OP is looking for a shared transit airport. That's different.
    – gerrit
    Jul 1, 2013 at 9:34

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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.

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    Thank you, this is what I ended up doing. Doing it in reverse definitely made it easier than doing it from the multiple departure locations to the single destination. Jul 1, 2013 at 19:20
  • A change of carrier does not necessarily mean two different tickets. If a connection comes up together on a (remotely conventional) flight search engine, one can assume that the flights will be interlined on a single ticket. Jan 22, 2017 at 10:58
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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.

enter image description here

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  • I love the idea and just tried to use your site. First tried Paris and Serbia for March, and it didnt work, then wasn't able to find any city pair that worked. Is the site still working?
    – J. Win.
    Feb 8, 2018 at 14:49
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    Thanks for your feedback! Yes, the site is still working! I'm not sure why you didn't find any results. I've just run the same search and it worked fine. tripmatch.org/#/… Can you tell us what browser are you using in case there's a problem we need to fix? Feb 19, 2018 at 22:13
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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.

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  • Thank you, doing that kind of thing with kayak.com (though I was using hipmunk and Matrix) is great advice - and the only thing I could do. Next time I have a complicated booking I'll be sure to look into flightfox.com - but time was against me here. Jul 1, 2013 at 19:24
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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.

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    That’s okay. Even answering three-year old questions is fine as long as you have a new tidbit of information (which you did have). As to why it was on the first page: It was probably poked by a new post that has since been deleted (I cannot see deleted posts). Other reasons would be an edit or the community user poking unanswered questions (but both are not the case here).
    – Jan
    Aug 16, 2016 at 20:15
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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

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