RPMatt

Multi-city flights, or open-jaw flights, are a great way to fly cheaply and with flexibility when you’re booking a trip. This works particularly well in somewhere like Europe or Southeast Asia where things are connected by regional airlines or trains. The premise here is that you fly into one airport, spend your trip meandering about wherever you have plans to go, and then fly out of a different airport on your return leg.

Often, you can find itineraries like this for similar prices as you would just going to and from one of the two (as long as they’re hubs anyways) and it saves you from having to waste time traveling back to the airport you flew into, while also saving money compared to booking two one-way flights. I used this strategy when booking my most recent trip, and I essentially combine this with the Greek Island trick. I prefer to fly into hubs and just take trains or small regional planes to places that are not a direct flight from the US anyways. Now, let’s look at some examples for European trips from the US.

First Example: Houston to Paris, Amsterdam to Houston

So I’m going to start with the example I actually used for my upcoming trip. In order to find the cheapest dates to fly, I first went on to Google Travel’s Explore page. If you select flexible dates, leave the “Where to?” box blank, and look at the map, you can usually see where the cheapest places to fly are and then use the calendar view of prices to find the best dates. Even if you’re not doing multi-city, this is one of the best ways to fly cheaply.

For me, I knew I was going to Paris and Amsterdam, and planned to go see places like Bruges, London, Rouen in between. Since these places are all very well connected by train, I decided to fly into Paris and out of Amsterdam, and take the train everywhere in between.

Now I’m going to switch back to Google flights, enter in the dates that I plan to take off, and see what happens. For this particular trip, I was able to book a direct flight with AirFrance to Paris, and a direct flight back on KLM. Since they both partner with Delta, I booked the flight through Delta and will be able to earn SkyMiles. This itinerary is common and easy to find, though it was nearly twice as much as the price when I booked my own trip.

I know this is quite hefty, but now let’s compare this to booking each leg as a one way ticket and see how much money this method would save.

The first leg to Paris ALONE is nearly as much as the whole round-trip itinerary above, and the second leg is even more. The total to book this trip separately is a whopping $2,885, $1,239 more than if you would have booked this trip open-jaw. Obviously, this is a bit of a random example based on my own slightly bizarre trip. So let’s look at another example that might be a more common trip.

Second Example: Fly cheaply from Houston to London, Edinburgh to Houston

This trip is more of a likely itinerary for someone who might be interested in exploring the UK outside of just London. From looking at the calendar on Google flights, it seems that the cheapest time for this trip is May 4th-May14th (or some other departures but let’s just assume a 10 day trip for now).

Not too surprisingly, the flight home does go back through Heathrow. For only $90 and a short layover, it makes way more sense to go with this than take a train back to London and spend the night in a hotel to catch a 9AM flight out of Heathrow. Now, let’s see how much more it would cost to book this trip as two separate one-way trips.

Once again, the cost of each leg is nearly as much, if not more, than the whole round-trip itinerary we booked earlier. Not to mention, the same return flight isn’t even available so you’re paying more for less convenient layovers, or different airlines (which may not matter depending on your rewards account preferences). Assuming you go with the cheapest options pictured, you would spend $1,907 for both legs, $1,090 more than you would have spent booking it as a multi-city trip.

Conclusion

Now that I’m working in Corporate America, I find that I am in a decent position to be able to afford trips, but lacking in time. Booking multi-city is my favorite way to maximize time and cover as much ground as possible. Once in Europe, I find that travel in between places is fairly cheap and efficient, so I have used this strategy a lot and seen lots of countryside from the train car as a result. Later, I’ll be writing a post on booking with EuroStar, a prominent train operator in Northwest Europe.

Thanks for reading and happy travels!