Book Multi-City for Considerable Savings

While Airline Bulletin typically doesn't cover information on how to get the best fares, I recently discovered a trick that was quite shocking. On most legacy carriers, due to the differences in some one-way and round-trip fares, customers can obtain significant variation in prices depending on how they search. Airline Web sites enable customers to search for a typical round-trip (say between San Francisco and Richmond) in several ways. Most airlines will let customers search by fare and schedule, but they also enable customers to make a multi-city search, if they are making several one-way journeys. If customers are searching by schedule, they can get widely differing prices for similar round-trip flights, but a multi-city search can help moderate prices.

Take the San Francisco to Richmond example. If you search by schedule for travel August 4 and returning the 8 on the American Airlines Web site, you get differing fares depending on whether you search by schedule, or do a multi-city search. If you do a multi-city search, you need to enter in the points of connection (since there is no nonstop flight between San Francisco and Richmond on American Airlines), which for purposes of this post are Dallas/Fort Worth in both directions. The flights I used are 2008, 1286, 1763, and 463. On the first multi-city leg, you would enter in SFO-DFW on August 4, on the second, you would enter DFW-RIC on August 4 and vice versa on the August 8 return. If you enter in flights via the multi-city tool I received a price of $556.60 (since ticket prices change so frequently, I don't guarantee that these prices will be the same if you choose to replicate my experiment, but please trust me). If I do a standard search by schedule from American's home page with the same flight numbers, I receive a price of $674.60. These are the same flights on the same days, but the only thing I did differently was that I changed the way I searched for the flights on American's Web site.

American isn't alone in this practice, I have found the same to be true on United, Delta, Northwest, and Continental, all of which offer fares specially designed for round-trip travel. While most low-cost carriers have one-way pricing on all flights, most legacy carriers still offer fares that can only be purchased if travelers are traveling round-trip. Sometimes, fares that are purchased as round-trips are more expensive than fares which are purchased as four one-ways (which is what the multi-city function enables travelers to do). One caveat with this trick is that it only works if you have a connecting flight. If you aren't connecting, this trick typically doesn't work. However, it's important to note that this feature of legacy carrier pricing systems works both ways. Often, especially for lower-priced round-trip fares, booking your travel as a multi-city journey of four one-ways is considerably more expensive than booking a round-trip via a search by schedule on the home page. But if the flights you're booking are expensive, then chances are that booking flights through the multi-city tool could save you a considerable amount of money.