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I need Skyscanner's calendar view and chart view for multi-city searches, but Skyscanner appears to offer them only for one-way or return trips.

E.g.: My dates are flexible as follows; so how do I determine which dates offer the cheapest flights?
1st Leg can be flown on any date in June: City 1 → City 2
2nd Leg can be flown on any date in September: City 2 → City 3
3rd Leg can be flown on any date in October: City 3 → City 4

I already tried the common search engines per these articles of Lifehacker and of Michael Bluejay.

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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because the reason this is not doable is already explained chiefly in travel.stackexchange.com/questions/54301/… but also travel.stackexchange.com/questions/49412/… is strongly related. I do not know how to close mark something as a duplicate of two questions so I picked the "other" option.
    – user4188
    Apr 15, 2016 at 3:35
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    @chx: A question can't be an exact duplicate of two questions because if it is, then one of the duplicates should also be closed.
    – Flimzy
    Apr 15, 2016 at 7:08
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    @chx Your first link is probably a valid dupe since both questions are asking for advanced flight booking sites offering things like "open-jaw multi-city flights", and its answer does seem to answer this question. The second is clearly a related question and not a duplicate - this question is clearly not asking "How do airlines determine ticket prices?", that's just (useful, link-worthy) related background info. This question is also clearly not off topic.
    – user56reinstatemonica8
    Apr 15, 2016 at 10:36
  • Is City 4 actually different from City 1? If so, are they at least close-by?
    – jcaron
    Apr 15, 2016 at 14:06
  • @jcaron No, City 4 can differ from City 1; I thought to allow this possibility in the interest of generality. But you are correct that they are probably near each other, but again I do not presuppose this.
    – user13759
    Apr 15, 2016 at 22:50

1 Answer 1

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Not sure if there are tools that will get you the result directly in an easily comprehensible form, but if not, the procedure to do so "manually" would go as follows (I'm considering you're actually coming back to the departure city):

  1. Find out the cheapest fare for the whole trip. You can use tools such as ExpertFlyer to look up fares.

    Note that in you case, it will need to be a fare from your origin to one of the two "destinations", which allows routing via the other destination, as well as at least one stopover. This will quickly eliminate a lot of the cheaper fares. You may also have a few other rules (validity dates, min/max duration...) that may further restrict which fares are applicable.

  2. Once you have found the valid fares, check out the associated booking class for each (the first letter of the fare code).

  3. For each of the flights, check for availability in those classes (for that airline) over a range of dates. Again, tools such as Expertflyer will let you do this. Once you've found a sequence of flights available with the right class, you should be able to book the whole trip on those dates. If there are no availabilities, start again with the next higher fare.

Note that you may also want to consider booking the flights independently (or a combination of two tickets). In some cases, you might even save by taking a series of return flights even if you don't use the return.

All in all, quite a bit of work indeed.

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