When planning individual trips (i.e. without an itinerary template as the trip backbone) that depend on flights for transportation, the availability of flights and their arrival times can significantly shape the overall itinerary. If flights are chosen after selecting other components like accommodations or car rentals, it can disrupt the planning process due to necessary adjustments.

To avoid this, it's best to start planning your itinerary by selecting your flights first. Once a flight is chosen, you can proceed with planning the rest of your trip using the Planner, and you will still have the option to change your initial flight selection if needed.

Starting your itinerary with a flight selection offers an alternative method to the standard approach of setting travel dates, destinations, and number of passengers (with room distribution) as described in the article Create an Individual Trip with Route Builder.

If you choose this approach, you will start at the first step of the booking flow without pre-selected flights. You can move to the “Transports” step later in the process.

This article focuses on this case, where you will begin at the first step of the booking flow with a pre-selected flight. The “Transports” step will be marked as complete, and the selected flight will be part of your itinerary. However, you can still navigate to the “Transports” tab to change your flight selection.

To enable this feature, follow these steps:

In the TripBuilder dashboard, under the Trips section (for Agents), clicking on any available links such as Suggested Tours, Branded Tours, or Create Own Tour will take you to the Discovery Overview page.

Based on the link selected, the relevant tab on the Discovery Overview page will be displayed. This article focuses on the Create Own Tour tab, which is set by default when you select the corresponding link.

When selecting the Search Flights tab, you can create an itinerary by choosing a flight first. Alternatively, you can use the Design Route, Import PNR or Create with AI flow under the other tab options.

Taking a roundtrip as an example, you will need to provide the following inputs:

Four secondary inputs are presented already with default values:

Clicking the Search button initiates a search, displaying a loading message while TripBuilder retrieves results from GDS/inventory (depending on TripBuilder’s instance configuration).

The Flights Overview page is displayed after the search results are generated.

At the top of the page, you'll see the same flight search input fields. This lets users initiate a new search without returning to the previous page.

The Select Journey section contains three main areas (in addition to the result count and the number of filtered results if filters are applied):

Each flight card generally includes the following details:

Each flight leg contains the following information:

Within each flight card, a checkbox is available beside each flight leg, allowing users to filter results based on the selected flight leg. In the case of a roundtrip, selecting a flight leg filters out all results that do not include that leg, regardless of airline, price, or duration.

For example, selecting a specific outbound leg from an initial 36 flights will narrow the options to just two flight results. As expected, the flights of the return leg are different. Different prices and airline carriers can be present in the results.

After identifying the most suitable flight, click the Select button to proceed to the Planner.

Once a flight is selected, the itinerary is instantiated with:

All Planner features are accessible, including route modifications, adjusting calendar days, adding other product types, and changing the selected flight.