Around the world with multi-city bookings

Essi Horppila is a Product Manager in the Finnair.com flight booking experience team, which includes software developers, designers and testers. “This new multi-city booking experience results from seamless collaboration within our product development team. Our customers have highly requested and anticipated functionality, and now they can book their dream multi-city trips,” Essi rejoices.

Flexibility and versatility with multi-city bookings

A multi-city booking means that you can choose up to six different destinations within one single flight booking flexibly also for a longer trip. Thanks to Essi’s team, making a multi-city booking is now easy directly on Finnair.com, while previously, you needed to contact Finnair’s customer care team.

“Now anyone can book and explore the multi-city travel options, which enables flexible booking possibilities across Finnair’s entire route network. Since we also offer flights with our partner airlines, this brings new ways of travelling more easily available to our customers. You can book and combine different flights better and more widely than before,” Essi says.

Booking multiple destinations under one flight reservation also brings lots of flexibility to your travel planning and enables you to tailor your trip better. “For instance, you can leave for a trip to Asia that lasts altogether for two months and spend one week in one destination, three days in the next, and so on,” Essi explains.

According to Essi, the possibility of a multi-city booking has been one of the most requested and eagerly awaited features for Finnair.com. Customers have been excited to try the new feature and have been making multi-city bookings ever since it became possible. Similarly to one-way and round trip reservations, you can pay for your multi-city reservation with Avios.

Stopovers are also available. When you wish to spend a day or two in a destination on your journey, it’s now easier than ever. For example, you can fly from Helsinki to London, spend a weekend there, and then continue to your primary destination, New York.

Popular combinations with multiple destinations

Essi says that right after the launch, she can identify customer favourites within the multi-city bookings. “For example, Helsinki, Kittilä and Ivalo have been extremely popular. Our customers travelling to Finland from Asia or Europe often wish to spend their holiday in multiple places in Finland. It is now effortless, as you can have different destinations with one flight booking.”

So far, the most popular multi-city bookings have been combinations of three destinations. According to Essi, it’s impossible to name the most popular combination – and perhaps the endless possibilities to combine different routes are, in fact, the beauty of the whole product.

Essi reveals some interesting route combinations favoured by our customers. One such example is a multi-city booking of Hamburg–Hong Kong–Brisbane–Singapore–Hamburg, in which the journey begins in Germany, includes two different Asian destinations and one Australian destination, and ends back in Germany. In another example, the trip starts in Hong Kong, and the customer flies to Reykjavik and, on the way back, has a stopover in Helsinki before returning to Hong Kong.