Multi-city vs. open-jaw: how flight routing actually prices
When planning a trip across Europe or Asia, it’s natural to want to fly into one city (like London) and out of another (like Rome) to avoid backtracking. But if you try to book this as two separate one-way tickets, you’ll often encounter astronomical prices.
Here is how international airline pricing actually works, and how to use “open-jaw” routing to your advantage.
The Problem with International One-Ways
Legacy international airlines (like Delta, British Airways, or Lufthansa) heavily penalize one-way tickets across oceans. A round-trip flight from New York to London might cost $800, but a one-way flight on the exact same route might price out at $1,500.
Airlines do this because one-way transatlantic travel is historically associated with less price-sensitive business travelers or people relocating, whereas round-trips are associated with vacationers.
The Open-Jaw Solution
If you want to fly into London and out of Rome, you shouldn’t book two one-ways. Instead, you need to book a multi-city or open-jaw itinerary on a single ticket.
An “open-jaw” is a round-trip ticket where the destination and the return origin are different (e.g., flying JFK to London, taking a train to Rome on your own, and flying Rome back to JFK).
When booked correctly on a single ticket, the airline prices each direction as a fare component — roughly the combination of each city’s half-round-trip fare — instead of as two expensive one-ways. In practice this usually avoids the one-way penalty, though the exact fare depends on the airline’s fare-construction and combinability rules.
Airline Alliances
The key to open-jaw pricing is that all flights must generally be operated by the same airline or their alliance partners (like SkyTeam, Star Alliance, or Oneworld). If you try to mix airlines that don’t partner, the ticket will fail to price as a round-trip and will default back to expensive one-way fares.
Navigating alliance routing rules and fare construction is complex. If you’re planning a multi-city international trip, request a quote and let our advisors find the most efficient routing.