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Originally Posted by
BearX220
One-way fares are always more expensive than round-trip fares;
Not always. It's almost always (IME) true for longer international trips, but many domestic US, intra-EU, etc. flights are priced the same one-way as round-trip. Some airlines price some routes with cheap (half of a r/t) one-way fares but not on others (e.g. Continental LGA-CLE-ORD has cheap one-way tickets, EWR-ORD does not.)
Originally Posted by
Alpha Golf
One-way fares are very high. What you need to do is book what's called an "open-jaw" roundtrip.
^ What he (?) said.
Many round-trip fares allow for open-jaws (think triangle with the shortest side missing), or even double open-jaws (think of a quadrilateral with the two shortest sides missing). "Shorter" is important; usually the distance between the open cities, in the OP's case ATH and IST, must be shorter than the distance of the flights (DC-ATH and DC-IST). For example, DC-ATH and ATH-IST together would not be considered an open-jaw, it would generally be considered a one-way DC-IST with a stopover in ATH, or could be two one-way tickets.
The "open" part can be at either end: DC-ATH and ATH-NYC would also be an open-jaw. An example of a double-open-jaw would be DC-ATH and IST-NYC.