How to Book an Open Jaw Flight

Опубликовал Admin

12-11-2016, 23:06

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Open-jaw flights are a great way to travel to two places without needing to waste time circling back to your original destination on the way home. They are also about the same price as a regular round-trip flight. So, they save you time and money!

Traditional Method

Go to your favorite flight search engine.
Look for the "multi-city" or "multiple destinations" link.
Enter your home airport as the "from airport" for the first leg, and the "to airport" for the second leg.
Pick one of your destinations and enter it as the "to airport" of the first leg. Use the other destination as the "from airport" of the second leg. Click the "search" or "find flights" button.
Repeat the search process but this time swap the order of visiting the two destinations. Sometimes one order will have better flights than the other.
Do a separate, one-way search to figure out how to get between the two destinations. You could enter all three flights into the same search but this will often result in more expensive flight options.
If you are visiting more than two destinations, you'll have to try mixing and matching until you find the right combination of two destinations to serve as your first and last destination. In some cases, you can book another (inverted) open-jaw to form an "end-on-end" itinerary.

Automated Method

Find a service to search for open jaw flights. Some web sites are designed specifically to handle optimizing trips across multiple destinations.
Enter your destinations. On this multi-destination site, you can typically enter the list of places you'd like to visit into a simple form and then click search. The site will compute the optimal itinerary for visiting those places, incorporating open-jaws and one-way flights as appropriate.

Tips

For domestic travel, you can often book each leg as a separate one-way flight. This will maximize flexibility. For international trips, though, this approach is often significantly more expensive.
Don't forget to also consider alternative transportation options to "close the jaw". For example, you can often travel by train for the domestic portion of your itinerary. Some sites using the "automated" method can incorporate this.

Warnings

Circle-fares (more than two legs on a single ticket) often result in more expensive prices. It is typically better to split the itinerary into a separate open-jaw booking for the larger distance and a one-way for the shorter segment.

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