Booking Multiple Flights at Once is Better for your Wallet

You’ve got that trip coming up. Buying the ticket has been on your to-do list for a while, you’ve checked the prices a few times but still haven’t booked. Your flight search engine tells you that the price is higher than usual, and you’re wondering if you should pay extra for that direct flight leaving right after work. Maybe you should go for the cheaper option leaving earlier? Should you wait? You get distracted and forget about it for a few days. When that happens, you should look into combining your booking with another trip.

What makes flights expensive

Flights become expensive for various reasons, including: (i) booking late, (ii) booking a short trip, and (iii) booking a route popular for business travel. The three are somewhat intertwined (e.g., business travellers often book short trips last minute), and they can all be circumvented by combining your trip with another future travel plan.

Back-to-back ticketing

A common way of achieving that is with back-to-back ticketing. It’s the simpler way of combining flights. Say you have two trips planned to the same destination (e.g., two weekends back home). Instead of booking two tickets one after the other, nest them into each other:

• Ticket 1 / depart: A → B
• Ticket 2 / depart: B → A
• Ticket 2 / return: A → B
• Ticket 1 / return: B → A

You are likely to get a better price booking that way. First, you’re pushing the return date further in time. This makes your trip longer and, therefore, likely cheaper. Second, one of two trips is departing from the destination city. If you live in a city where flights tend to be expensive, you might see a steep decline in the price of the nested ticket. In some cases, the total price of both trips might even be cheaper than the first roundtrip alone. So even if you have to cancel the future trip, you still save!

Generalized nested ticketing

The back-to-back strategy is fairly known. If you’re a savvy traveler, you might do it already. However, you can get a little creative here. First, the two trips don’t have to be to the same destination. If you combine multicity tickets together, you can put together two different travel plans:

• Ticket 1 / depart: A → B
• Ticket 2 / depart: B → A
• Ticket 2 / return: A → C
• Ticket 1 / return: C → A

And there’s more. Who said you had to book two tickets? You can try a whole multicity ticket:

• Ticket 1 / depart: A → B
• Ticket 1 / depart: B → A
• Ticket 1 / return: A → B
• Ticket 1 / return: B → A

Or some separate legs in the mix:

• Ticket 1 / depart: A → B
• Ticket 2 / depart: B → A
• Ticket 2 / return: A → B
• Ticket 3 / return: B → A

You can also have them all as separate tickets, or a 3-leg multicity with a single one-way ticket. In fact, a 4-leg itineraries has 15 possible ticket combinations. The more you combine travel plans, the more ways they are to book your flights, and the more likely it is you’ll reduce your total travel cost.

Book different flights at the same time. You’ll circumvent the minimum stay requirements that drive the price up, and you’ll have more ways to partition your booking into an optimized combination of tickets.

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