What are open-jaw flights?

The shape, in one picture

A normal return flight is a closed loop: you leave from A, arrive at B, and come home from B to A. An open jaw breaks one end of that loop.

• Open jaw at the destination. Fly London → Rome, travel overland to Venice, fly Venice → London. You never fly out of the city you flew into.
• Open jaw at the origin. Fly London → New York, then New York → Manchester. You come home to a different airport from the one you left.
• Double open jaw. Both ends differ. Fly Dublin → Madrid, and later Lisbon → Manchester.

The gap you cover yourself — by train, bus, car or a separate cheap flight — is the "jaw". Airlines and booking systems have priced these for decades; it is not a loophole and it does not breach anyone's terms. It is a standard fare construction, and it is different in kind from skiplagging, which involves not flying a segment you have paid for.

Why it is often cheaper

Because the cheapest way into a region and the cheapest way out of it are almost never the same airport.

We ran this properly on a journey we needed to book ourselves in August 2026 — Dubai to the Algarve in Portugal and back. Every search we did at first assumed the same European gateway at both ends. Nobody had told us to do that. It was a constraint we had invented, and dropping it was the single biggest saving available.

The trip went from £897 to £549 — a 39% cut — mostly because entry and exit were allowed to differ. The two cheapest Dubai long-hauls were on opposite sides of Europe: Vienna outbound at £214, Brussels homebound at £189. On the short-haul side, the cheapest way into Faro was from Madrid at £14.98 and the cheapest way out was to Prestwick at £21.99. Forcing one city at both ends meant paying a premium at one end or the other, every single time.

Those were the fares we were quoted on one day. They will not be the fares you see. The mechanism is the part that transfers.

The trap: a cheap component is not a cheap total

This is the mistake that costs the most, and it is the one that feels most like being clever.

In that same search, the cheapest single flight in the entire exercise led to the most expensive trip on the board. Dubai to Istanbul was £310 return — nothing came close. The whole trip through Istanbul came to £840, because Istanbul to Faro was £350.

It happened again and again:

• Sofia's Dubai leg was £338. Trip total: £1,147.
• Edinburgh had the second-cheapest hop to Faro anywhere, £28. Trip total: £642, because Dubai to Scotland is dear.
• Oslo's hop was £41 — more expensive than Edinburgh's — and the trip total was £561.

Price every leg before you rank anything. A cheap component tells you nothing about the total, and the aggressively cheap component is often cheap precisely because its complement is not.

Search the airport, not the city

Searching "London" returned £67 to Faro. Priced airport by airport, Stansted was £27 and Luton £34. That one habit inflated every London total by around £40 for hours before we noticed.

City codes, metro-area codes, "regions" and flexible date ranges all have the same failure mode: they hide the cheap member inside an average. If you are building an open jaw, search the atom — the specific airport, the specific date. On our own flight search, a one-way search shows a fare calendar of the cheapest fare on each nearby departure date, which is the fastest way to see whether your date is the expensive one.

Frequency is a fact about the trip, not a detail

The quiet killer. In that search, 21 airports had flights into Faro and no departure at all on the day we needed to leave. Edinburgh and Barcelona were the dangerous ones — cheap, frequent-looking, and dark on Wednesdays. Prague ran Tuesdays only; Riga, Saturdays only.

A price for a flight that does not operate on your date is worse than no price, because it still ranks. Always check the day of the week, and always sweep the adjacent days: moving our Portugal departure by one day was cheaper, bought an extra night, and changed which cities were reachable at all — four appeared and three vanished.

What an open jaw hides

Combining separately-priced parts makes it very easy to combine parts that are not the same place, or to build a total that quietly excludes real costs. These are the ones that bit us:

• The junction. Twice in one session we built a total from a Manchester hop plus London's long-haul, and from a Gatwick arrival plus a Stansted departure. The second is a two-hour cross-London transfer that nobody had priced. Check that every joined component is literally the same airport, and price any ground link in both minutes and money.
• Separate tickets are not protected. If two legs are on one ticket and the first runs late, the airline owns the problem. On separate tickets, a missed connection is your problem and your money. That distinction is worth more than it costs on paper.
• Ground time you did not see. One £505.07 itinerary in that search looked like the winner until we looked inside it: a 4 hour 25 minute wait in Bahrain airport, 21:15 to 01:40, and a 50-minute touchdown in Milan hidden inside a single flight number.
• Nights and transfers priced at zero. Every extra gateway city is potentially a hotel night and two airport transfers. If your plan involves an overnight, it has a cost — either a room, or a night in a terminal. Our flight and hotel bundles exist partly because that pairing is so easy to forget.
• Inventory nobody can see. Some airlines sell only on their own site and appear in no comparison tool at all. Any "cheapest flight" answer built purely from aggregators is incomplete on European short-haul, and it fails silently — the route simply is not there.

When an open jaw is the wrong answer

We finished that whole exercise, found the cheap answer, and then deliberately booked a more expensive one: a single round trip on one airline, one ticket, one country.

The reasoning was not sentimental. Four flights across two extra countries carried hotel nights the search had priced at zero, transfers in every city, a separate-ticket connection with no protection, and an overnight wait in an airport. Against that, the dearer fare bought one ticket, one check-in, and arriving where we actually wanted to be.

A cheap component is not a cheap total, and a cheap total is not a cheap trip. An open jaw is worth real money when the ground leg is short, scenic or something you wanted to do anyway — Rome to Venice by train, Lisbon to Faro by road. It is worth much less when the jaw exists purely to chase a fare, and it can be worth nothing at all once you price the nights, the transfers and the risk.

How to build one with us

Honestly: our flight search offers one-way and round-trip only. There is no multi-city box today, so you build an open jaw as two one-way searches — A to B, then C back to A — and hold the two prices side by side.

That is slightly more work than a multi-city field, and it has one advantage worth naming: you are forced to see each leg's real price rather than a blended total, which is exactly the discipline that found the 39%.

When you have the shape, search hotels in whichever city you are actually sleeping in, or start from a destination guide if the middle of the trip is still undecided. If your legs land at an airport hotel, hotels near airports is the faster way in.

Common questions

Is an open-jaw ticket allowed by airlines?

Yes. It is a standard fare construction that airlines and global distribution systems have supported for decades. You are flying every segment you paid for, which is what separates it from schemes that rely on abandoning a leg.

Is an open jaw always cheaper than a return?

No. It is cheaper when the cheapest entry and exit points differ, which is common on long-haul into a large region and rare on a short point-to-point hop. Sometimes the plain return wins, and you only know by pricing both.

Do I need two separate bookings?

With us, yes — two one-way flights. Some airlines and agents will sell a single open-jaw ticket. A single ticket is generally better if a delay could make you miss a connection, because the airline then owns the rebooking.

What happens if one leg is cancelled?

The operating airline owns the outcome for that leg, and the other leg is unaffected because it is a separate contract. That is the downside of separate tickets. We have written up what happens if your flight is cancelled in full.

How do I get between the two cities?

Train, bus, car hire or a separate cheap flight. Price it in minutes as well as money — a "cheap" jaw that takes six hours on a travel day is not cheap.

Does an open jaw affect baggage or seat rules?

Each ticket carries its own rules. Two one-ways can have different baggage allowances, different fare rules and different change fees. Read both before you pay, not after.

Will the overnight in a connecting city cost me a hotel?

It will if the wait is long enough to need one. Check the gap between arrival and departure before you compare totals, and if there is a genuine overnight, price the room. Red-eye flights are the version of this problem that most people underestimate.

Can I track prices on both legs?

Not through us — we do not run a price-alert product, and we would rather say so than imply one. How flight price tracking works explains what these tools actually do and what they cannot promise.

Where do I see the two bookings afterwards?

Both appear in your trips. Because they are two separate reservations, cancelling one does not cancel the other, and each is governed by its own rules — our cancellation policy explains how those are applied.