Save money and time booking an open jaw ticket using the info and tips below. The "open jaw" is how you transport yourself from the 2 different arrival and destination cities on your open jaw ticket.
What is an open jaw?
In the above open jaw flights ‘ example, the open jaw is "the opening between the 2 cities on your open jaw airline ticket", in this case you need to find your own transport to travel the "jaw" from Amsterdam to Munich.
What are open jaw tickets
Open jaw flights are a kind of triangular round trip flights:
- depart in A and arrive in B,
- yet depart in C and return to arrive back to A.
An open jaw ticket is a special form of a cheap one way airline ticket. Actually it’s an airfare combining 2 one way airline tickets as in the example below:
- Plane ticket from Singapore to Brussels
- Plane ticket from Barcelona to Singapore
Open jaw flights offer you the possibility to:
- land in one destination,
- travel around by yourself and
- take off again from another city than the city you first landed in.
In the above example you could land in Brussels, rent a car and travel south all the way to Barcelona, leave your car there and take a plane back home to Singapore.
How do open jaw airline tickets save you time and money
Open jaw travel saves you both time and money:
- time as you don’t have to drive all the way back to Brussels
- money:
- as you don’t buy an extra air ticket to fly from Barcelona back to Brussels as you would have done with a Singapore-Brussels roundtrip air ticket
- as an open jaw trip is cheaper compared to buying the 2 one way flights separately.
What’s the price of open jaw plane tickets?
An open jaw air ticket averages out the price of two roundtrip fares. In the example :
- the roundtrip fare from Singapore to Brussels costs $1534
- the roundtrip fare from Singapore to Barcelona costs $995.
You should be able to purchase open jaws for about half the price of the 2 roundtrip fares:
($1534 + $995)/2 = about $1262
Where and when to use an open jaw itinerary
When you are going to travel a huge distance over land from one destination to another, you should consider open jaw airline tickets. Open jaw is especially great when traveling through Europe!
Normally, open jaw tickets are issued when you are traveling from within one country to one other country. The biggest and most interesting exception to this rule is Europe. Europe is considered to be "one country" when it comes to open jaw tickets.
That’s why in the above examples:
- we land in Brussels, Belgium yet depart in Barcelona, Spain
- we land in Amsterdam, Netherlands yet depart in Munich, Germany
How to find the cheapest open jaw air tickets
- The flights must be on the same airline or its partners (e.g., KLM and Air France)
- The distance of the "open jaw" – the segment traveled on land – usually must be shorter than either of the two flown segments.
- The fares used for the two flown sections must conform to airline rules:
- they must be combinable
- when fares rules differ, your ticket will follow the most restrictive one. For instance, if the roundtrip Singapore – Brussels fare allows a maximum stay of 60 days, but the roundtrip Singapore – Barcelona fare allows only 30 days, then the maximum stay permitted on your open jaw trip will be 30 days.
How to book the least expensive open jaw tickets
Most online discount airfare sites offer an easy way to set up an open jaw ticket:
- on Travelocity and Orbitz, choose the multi-destination or multi-city option
- on Expedia, first click One-Way and then choose multi-destination
So, plan your next travel – especially to Europe – using open jaw tickets and save time and money!
