Hot Picks: algorithmic multi-city flight deals
Enter an origin airport and dates. Hot Picks scores closed-loop itineraries — trips that start and end at home — then opens the full map of daily deals.
What Hot Picks actually searches
A naive multi-city search explodes: every extra stop multiplies outbound flights, stay windows, and the return home. Hot Picks does not enumerate every combination. It runs a greedy recursive search over the flight graph, keeping only branches that still look cheap after a return-cost lookahead.
- Closed-loop trips. Every result starts and ends at your origin so you are not stranded in the last city.
- Return potential. Before committing to a next city, the engine checks the cheapest known fare home from that airport and drops expensive dead-ends early.
- Hub bias. Airports with dense budget-carrier graphs stay in the search longer because they unlock more second and third stops.
How to read a Hot Pick
The map view is the working tool. Use this page to start a search; submit origin and dates to open the Hot Picks map. Each card is a scored itinerary, not a packaged airline multi-city ticket. Legs are typically separate one-ways, which is how budget carriers price Europe.
Want the engineering detail — C++ core, Python orchestration, scoring weights? Read how the Hot Picks algorithm works.
When to use Combi-Search instead
Hot Picks is for inspiration: you pick an origin and a window, we propose cities. If you already know the cities and stay lengths, use Combi-Search so the planner respects your route order.