Hack your way to cheaper travel
We know you love to travel for less, and it’s now easier than ever with Kiwi.com’s travel hacks, unique search options, and customizable filters. Discover more about how they work and go grab yourself a flight deal at Kiwi.com.
Self-transfer
Our self-transfer hack helps you reach any destination even if airlines don’t provide it as an existing itinerary. How does it work? It’s fairly straightforward. You give us the “where” and “when” and we create a travel itinerary out of separate flights from different airlines. You get where you need to go – for less.
Hidden cities ticketing
Our hidden cities hack is great if you like to travel to popular destinations and you want to beat the high prices on popular direct routes. Let’s say you want to travel from Amsterdam to Barcelona, but it costs too much. We’ll find you a two-leg itinerary with a layover in Barcelona, where you decide to say “Hasta la vista, second leg!”
Throwaway ticketing
Throwaway tickets help you hack the often expensive one-way fares. So, if an airline is selling a round-trip ticket cheaper than a one-way ticket, we’ll offer it to you, even though you’ve set your search filter to one-way.
Nomad — the ultimate multi-city flight search
With Nomad, our unique multi-city search tool, you simply input three or more destinations, your length of stay and travel dates, and the cheapest possible route will be found in a flash. Don’t overload your browser or fry your brain trying to figure out the best and the cheapest multiple-destination itinerary — save all that energy for your trip!
Flight price alerts
We know that flight prices change all the time. Our price alerts keep track of this and will notify you when the cost of your trip changes so that you can book when you see a price you like. No need to search for the same route again; just set up your personal price alert and trust our Kiwi-Code, which checks billions of routes every day.
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Flexible ticketing options
We give you Flexi, Standard, and Saver ticket options because we understand that sometimes, you need a flexible ticket that allows you to change or cancel your trip; and other times, you just want to grab a bargain and not pay a penny more.
Price FX for lower exchange rates
Our goal is to make travel simple, cheap, and transparent, so when you buy a ticket with us, we won’t charge you any unfair exchange rate fees as many airlines do. When you pay in your chosen currency, we’ll only charge the middle market rate.
We hack the system, you fly for less
Technology that makes travel cheaper and simpler for everyone
Kiwi-Code sees 95% of all the flights from around the world and performs billions of flight price checks every day to give you the most up-to-date search results, always. What does that mean for you? It’s simple: you get more travel search results than you would anywhere else. You see the deals and travel options that airlines don’t want you to see and other search engines can’t even find. This is how, when you book with Kiwi.com, you’re getting some of the best travel deals on the internet.
Travel innovations that shake things up
Kiwi.com reinvents and reimagines the travel industry and its technology. We shake things up so you can use that technology with ease when booking your trips. We want to set travel tech trends that others will follow, because we believe that it’s the only way the travel industry can make traveling more accessible for everyone.
We want our travel tech to show you all of your travel options, so that you can decide whether you want to stick with the standard itinerary, or whether you want to take advantage of our travel hacks that might make the journey cheaper or more convenient.
Travel is about freedom. So are our hacks.
Kiwi.com suits both experienced and inexperienced travelers who are looking for regular travel search results, but are also asking for something extra — like our travel hacks. We realize that not all our travel hacks are suited to just any trip, but we still want to give you the final say. That’s why, when you search for a specific destination or route, the search results on our Kiwi.com website or on the Kiwi.com app will consist of all the standard options from all the relevant carriers, plus any available travel hack options: routes that feature self-transfer, hidden cities, and throwaway ticketing.
What is a travel hack?
At Kiwi.com, what we call a “travel hack” is anything that makes your travel experience easier and cheaper, and that positively disrupts the way flight and travel search engines work.
Our four main travel hacks are:
What is self-transfer?
The self-transfer hack helps you travel anywhere by connecting airlines and carriers that don’t usually cooperate with each other. It’s an extremely useful hack especially when there are no direct flights between smaller airports.
Our self-transfer hack is synonymous with virtual interlining, a complicated-sounding term for a simple idea: creating itineraries out of flights from airlines that don’t normally work together. With our Kiwi-Code, we made self-transfer work by creating an algorithm that seamlessly combines flights from different airlines into one itinerary. This way, we give you routes that other travel companies can’t map out, and it saves you from having to spend long hours looking at every possible airline, every possible connection, and every possible price to piece them together on your own.
Hidden cities ticketing
This travel hack involves buying flight tickets to a less popular destination with a layover in a popular destination, compared to buying the direct flight to the popular destination. In other words, a flight between city A and city C with a layover at city B might be cheaper than a direct flight between city A and city B.
On most travel search engines, this lower price would only be visible if you were specifically looking to travel from New York to Des Moines, but Kiwi.com can take connections into account as well. That means, if Chicago is your destination, we’ll find it hidden within an airline’s itinerary. You get the cheaper ticket, and simply end your journey in Chicago.
Throwaway tickets
When you buy a throwaway ticket, you have the intention of traveling with it to your destination, but you don’t intend to use the return part of the ticket. This hack comes in useful when you want to travel one way, but the round-trip fare is cheaper than a one-way ticket.
For instance, if you intend to fly from London to Rome, you may find out that a one-way ticket costs €600, but that the round-trip fare is only €300. Therefore, you buy the cheaper ticket from London to Rome and back. You board the flight to Rome but not the flight back to London, and the second half of the ticket gets discarded when you don’t show up for the return flight. You can “throw away” only the return leg of the trip, as not showing up for the outbound flight usually leads to the entire reservation being canceled by the airline.
Nomad multi-city flight search
Multi-city trip options have long been a feature of online travel agencies. But travelers always had to create their own itineraries, often experimenting with different combinations in dozens of browser windows to make their own comparisons and eventually find the best route.
Now with Nomad, Kiwi.com does the work for you — in seconds. You save hours of your time, and potentially significant amounts of money, when searching for cheap flights with this revolutionary multi-city tool. Nomad from Kiwi.com allows you to input multiple destinations and your desired duration of stay in each of them, before it calculates the cheapest possible route. In other words, Nomad shuffles the destinations you input and finds you the most cost-effective itinerary.
This is precisely what Kiwi.com is all about: using technology to make travel easier and cheaper for everyone.
It’s not just our hacks that help you save money
Many people who book with us don’t need to use travel hacks to get to where they need to go. This is why, aside from coming up with more hacks, we’re also constantly improving all other aspects of our business to make our customers’ booking and traveling experiences smoother and cheaper.
Travel search features
We always make sure that when you’re looking to book a flight with us, we can offer you exactly what you need to travel as smoothly and cheaply as possible. Both the Kiwi.com website and the Kiwi.com app have search features that allow you to search for a particular trip when you know exactly how, where and when you wish to travel; but we also have very customizable filters, so you can find cheaper tickets if you’re on a limited travel budget.
Search to: Anywhere
Try the Kiwi.com Search to: Anywhere feature — it lets you discover interesting places you normally wouldn’t think of, and you can sort them by price. You could be somewhere amazing for next to nothing in no time! You can also choose to fly anytime, extending your options even further.
Other custom search filters on Kiwi.com include:
- Time of stay: set a concrete or flexible time frame for how long you’d like to stay
- Interactive calendar: shows you prices for each day of the month so you can select the best deal
- Set price range: only search for trips within your budget
- Airport radius: search for trips that start or end within a set radius of your departure or destination, so that you can find a cheaper flight from or to a nearby airport
- Carriers: search for your preferred airline
- Exclude countries: remove routes that go via countries you think might be difficult or inconvenient to enter, such as countries with visa or Covid-19 related travel restrictions
- Times: depart or arrive at a certain time of day
- Duration: choose a maximum travel time
- Days: pick the day of the week that’s most convenient for you to travel
Flexible tickets
When you buy from Kiwi.com, you can select one of three levels of ticket flexibility: Flexi, Standard, and Saver. Each of these differently-priced tickets provides a different level of rebooking and cancellation flexibility. This means that you can choose the right ticket to suit your budget and travel plans.
Price FX
At Kiwi.com, when you decide to pay in your home currency, we simply charge you the middle of the market rate. Airlines can charge up to 6.5% in exchange rate fees — a common (and generally hidden) extra cost for the customer. Booking with Kiwi.com means you get the fairest exchange rate.
Flight price alerts
Do you have your eye on a specific trip? We’ll notify you when the cost of it changes, and you can book exactly when you like the price. No need to search for the same route again; just set up your price alert and trust our Kiwi-Code, which checks billions of prices every day.
This is what Kiwi.com is all about: using technology to make travel easier and cheaper for globetrotters like you.
Frequently asked questions
The term "travel hack" applies to anything that positively disrupts the way flight and travel search engines work, and makes the customer’s travel experience easier, cheaper and more accessible as a result.
A good travel hack saves you money or time, or sometimes even both. Here are some of our hacks that can help you cut costs or speed up your search:
- Take advantage of throwaway ticketing, hidden cities, or self-transfer. When you search for a trip on our website, all the results that feature these hacks will be marked with a little green star and the words ‘Travel hack’.
- Use Nomad, our unique multi-city tool for planning and booking itineraries with more then three destinations. It’ll save you a lot of time (and money too, in most cases).
- If you’re flexible with your plans, you can search for flights for whenever to wherever using our Anytime and Anywhere search filters. This will find you the best deals available from your departure point.
- When planning your trip, you can also look for prices from nearby airports. Do this when you search by extending the radius from your preferred airport to allow options departing within that area to appear in your search results.
Yes. You can’t get into any kind of legal trouble for taking advantage of our throwaway ticketing, hidden cities, or self-transfer travel hacks.
“Skiplagging” is another term that some use to refer to our hidden cities travel hack, which involves saving money on your ticket by using an airline layover as a final destination. To read more about how this works, click here.
Finding cheap flights doesn’t have to be mind-boggling or time-consuming. Here are some tips that can help you simplify or speed up your search for great deals:
- Make use of travel hacks such as throwaway ticketing, hidden cities, and self-transfer.
- If you’re flexible with your plans, you can search for flights for whenever to wherever using our Anytime and Anywhere search filters. This will find you the best deals available from your departure point.
- Don’t forget to consider ground transport. Buses and trains can often be cheaper and sometimes even quicker than getting a flight.
- Include nearby airports, bus stations and train stations in your search to uncover even more travel options.
- Set price alerts for the dates and routes you’re looking for, so you can keep track of price changes and grab the best deal.
When you search for cheap flights with Kiwi.com, this is exactly what you’ll get: some of the cheapest airfares on the market.
You don’t strictly “search” for travel hacks; a hack will appear in a search result if our Kiwi-Code determines that that hack will make the itinerary cheaper. In other words, when you search for a trip on Kiwi.com, we’ll show you every available deal, including itineraries that feature travel hacks. The most common travel hacks which make itineraries cheaper are self-transfer, throwaway ticketing, and hidden cities:
- Self-transfer combines flights from carriers that don’t usually cooperate, making it possible to travel with the big carriers and the low-budget airlines on the same journey. This is the travel hack that’s at the very core of our product.
- Throwaway ticketing catches round-trip tickets that are cheaper than their one-way counterparts.
- Hidden cities is about finding you a ticket with a layover at your intended destination that is cheaper than the direct fare.
All you have to do is look out for the green-star “Travel hack” icon in your search results, click on the itinerary, and you’ll get all the information you need to travel for less.
We can help! Try our Nomad search tool and you’ll be saving time, energy, and most importantly, money. Gone are the days of checking multiple websites to piece together a complex itinerary on your own — with Nomad, you can book your entire trip in just a single search.
- From the Kiwi.com homepage, select Nomad from the dropdown menu in the search form.
- Set your departure city, departure date, and the number of nights you want to be away.
- Add the places that you want to visit and the lengths of time that you want to spend in each one.
- Based on your search criteria, we’ll build the cheapest itineraries for you.
- Choose your adventure and book your trip!
Some airlines offer flexible tickets, which tend to be more expensive, but that give you the option to travel on any date or change the date of your trip as many times as you like. With Kiwi.com, you can choose between three simple ticket types regardless of the carrier(s), so you can find the right balance between traveling for cheap and the having the flexibility you want.
If your plans might change but you still want to save a seat, we recommend that you choose our Flexi ticket. If you end up changing your trip, you’ll only pay the fare difference for the new booking. If you cancel, you’ll get back 90% of the amount you paid, either as a monetary refund or in Kiwi.com Credit.
The Standard ticket provides a reasonable degree of flexibility. If you change your trip, you’ll only pay the fare difference for the new booking and we’ll cover the rest. If you cancel your trip, you’ll get €10 in Kiwi.com Credit to put towards a new booking. This applies only to bookings originally priced at €20 or more.
If your plans are set in stone, we recommend the Saver ticket at the very cheapest price. If you need to change your trip, you’ll have to pay for the new booking in full. If you cancel your trip, you’ll get €10 in Kiwi.com Credit to put towards a new booking. This applies only to bookings originally priced at €20 or more.
Price FX (FX = “foreign exchange”) is a foreign exchange rate tool that bypasses the all too common pitfall of high airline exchange rate fees that customers are charged when they pay in their preferred currency.
If you pay on an airline’s website in a currency that the airline doesn’t use, your money will go through a foreign bank — a bank that operates in the airline’s primary currency. When this happens, there is usually a cost to cover the conversion of your money through the bank. Price FX, however, means that when you book with Kiwi.com in your local currency, regardless of what an airline is charging, we will only ever charge you exchange fees based on the middle of the market rate.
Avoid higher exchange fees by booking with Kiwi.com. When you search for flights on our website or in our app, the prices of the results will be in your specified preferred currency, and any exchange to calculate those prices will have been made according to the middle of the market rate.
If you must book directly with an airline, you can cheapen any exchange rate fees by setting the currency on the website to that at the point of the flight’s departure (e.g. to US dollars if you’re departing from New York). You should then only be charged by your own bank according to their fees.
How to change currency on the Kiwi.com website and in the Kiwi.com app
Flight disruptions occur more frequently now than ever before, so it’s good to have a plan B in case any of your flights are canceled, delayed, or rescheduled. This is why we offer the Kiwi.com Guarantee to cover your entire trip, so that you’re protected in case of any changes or cancellations instigated by the carrier(s).
Here’s when the Kiwi.com Guarantee comes in handy:
- your trip gets canceled, entirely or in part
- your trip gets rescheduled by more than 24 hours, entirely or in part
- part of your trip is delayed to the extent that you miss your connection(s)
- your baggage is delayed at reclaim or there are long queues at immigration to the extent that you miss your connection(s)
In any of these cases, we’ll offer you either a refund or an alternative journey to your destination. The exact rules depend on how long it is before your departure day at the time of the disruption occurring.
The Kiwi.com Guarantee covers your entire trip, whether you use self-transfer or not, and no matter whether you’re traveling by plane, train, or bus. We strongly recommend that you add the Guarantee to your booking if you have a complex itinerary with several flights and layovers.
Price alerts help you keep track of flight prices and ensure that you find out that the price of your trip has gone down exactly as it happens. Setting up price alerts is easy:
- Sign into your Kiwi.com account.
- Search for a trip; set dates, departure and arrival points, as well as the number of passengers and baggage options.
- Toggle the ‘Set up price alerts’ slider on your desktop or tap the bell icon in the app (both of which are in the top left-hand corner of the results page).
- Enable push notifications in the app to get instant alerts, and make sure you whitelist Kiwi.com in your email settings. And that’s it — we’ll send you emails and push notifications when the price of your trip drops.
Flying often seems like the best mode of transport, but it doesn’t work in all cases of A to B. For example, if you’re traveling to a smaller city that doesn’t have an airport, you might need to book both a flight an onward bus or a train. With Kiwi.com, you can book the entire journey in one smooth transaction without needing to compare lots of prices and schedules on different websites. This ultimately means that you’re able to pick the most convenient travel option to suit you.
- Search for a trip; set dates, departure and arrival points, as well as the number of passengers and baggage options.
- On the results page, you can then filter itineraries by mode of transport — choose to see or hide itineraries featuring flights, trains, and/or buses. You’ll find these filters at the top of the screen on your mobile device, or on the left-hand side of your desktop screen. Here’s what they look like:
If you decide to combine a flight with ground transport, it’s important to be mindful of the layover duration versus the time it takes to get between the station and the airport, so that you don’t miss your connection. Remember that if you have the Kiwi.com Guarantee and any part of your trip is rescheduled or canceled, we can help you out with an alternative journey or a refund.
