Open-Jaw Flights: Fly Into One City, Home From Another
An open-jaw ticket lets you arrive in one city and depart from a different one. No backtracking required. For trips that cross regions or cover multiple cities, open-jaw itineraries are often both cheaper and more practical than round trips.
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Most travellers book round trips automatically — fly to destination, fly back from destination. But for many trips, this creates unnecessary backtracking. If you want to explore northern Italy, flying into Milan and home from Venice is a far better itinerary than flying both ways to Milan and taking a return train.
This is an open-jaw ticket: a return itinerary where the departure city and the return city are different.
How open-jaw tickets work
An open-jaw ticket has two legs:
- Outbound: Home city → Destination A
- Return: Destination B → Home city
You are responsible for getting yourself from Destination A to Destination B (the "jaw" — the missing leg). This gap in the itinerary is yours to fill — by train, budget airline, bus, or rental car.
Some booking systems also support a double open-jaw, where both ends of the itinerary differ (Destination A → Destination B, with no fixed home city on either side). These are useful for one-way trips that end somewhere different from where they started.
When open-jaw is cheaper than round trip
Counter-intuitively, open-jaw tickets are sometimes cheaper than round trips. This happens because airlines price each leg independently, and the individual legs of an open-jaw itinerary may fall into cheap fare buckets that are not available when both legs are tied to the same city.
The easiest case: you want to go to Barcelona and come back from Madrid. A Barcelona round trip is €180. A Madrid round trip is €160. An open-jaw — fly to Barcelona, return from Madrid — might be €155, because the pricing system optimises each leg separately.
This does not always work — sometimes the round trip is cheaper — but it is worth checking. Many booking tools allow open-jaw searches; others require you to piece together two one-way tickets and compare the total.
When open-jaw makes practical sense
Multi-city road trips: Drive or train from city A to city B, fly home from B. Eliminates the return leg of ground travel.
Island hopping: Fly into Athens, spend time in the islands, fly home from Thessaloniki or Heraklion.
Exploring a region from multiple entry points: Fly into Lisbon, travel south through the Algarve, fly home from Faro.
Business trips that end in a different city: Attend a conference in Frankfurt, end the trip visiting clients in Munich, fly home from Munich.
Avoiding backtracking entirely: Any linear itinerary — north to south, east to west — is improved by an open-jaw structure.
How to book an open-jaw
On legacy carrier websites: Most full-service airline websites have a "multi-city" search option. Enter your itinerary as two separate legs. Fare systems usually price this correctly.
On Google Flights: Use the multi-city search. Enter Flight 1 as Home → City A, and Flight 2 as City B → Home. Leave the middle gap blank — you handle that yourself.
With budget carriers: Budget airline websites often do not support true open-jaw searches. Search two separate one-way fares instead. This sometimes requires two separate bookings, which is fine.
Via a travel agent or comparison site: Some aggregators (Kayak, Skyscanner) support open-jaw searches directly. Worth checking for complex itineraries.
The gap: getting from A to B
The missing leg — from your arrival city to your departure city — is the open-jaw's practical challenge. The calculation is simple: does the total cost of the open-jaw ticket plus the gap transport beat the round trip alternative?
Often it does, because the gap transport is a budget airline fare or a train ticket. A Barcelona to Madrid AVE train is €30–€80 and takes 2.5 hours. A Ryanair flight from Lisbon to Faro is €15. A rental car from Athens airport north to Thessaloniki covers the gap while doubling as the transport for the whole trip.
The gap is also frequently a positive — it is part of the trip, not a cost. A train from Milan to Venice is not just transport; it is a day of the holiday.
Open-jaw and FairFares
FairFares deal alerts are naturally suited to open-jaw thinking. When you see a cheap outbound fare to one city and a cheap return fare from a nearby city on separate alerts, combining them into an open-jaw itinerary gives you the benefit of both deals with a flexible gap in the middle.
The key habit: when looking at deals from your home airport, keep open-jaw possibilities in mind. A cheap fare to Krakow and a cheap fare from Budapest are not just two separate deals — they are two halves of an excellent open-jaw itinerary with a train journey through southern Poland in the middle.
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