SPIT-

in answer to 2 of your questions-

NESTED TICKETS

I live in NJ and need to go to Dallas for a week at a time, once a month or so. I don't want to stay over a Saturday.

So, I buy a EWR-DFW round trip ticket from Airline A leaving NJ Monday, returning Friday 4 weeks later. I then buy a DFW-EWR round trip ticket from Airline B, leaving DFW the Friday of the week I arrive on Airline A, and returning from NJ back to DFW on the Monday of the week I want to go back to DFW. So, my itinerary looks like this:

Monday Airline A EWR-DFW
following Friday Airline B DFW-EWR
Monday a couple of weeks later Airline B EWR-DFW
following Friday Airline A DFW-EWR

If you book both these flights on the same airline it's a violation of their rules. If you book them on 2 different airlines it's very hard for hem to catch and, as far as I know, no violation. I wouldn't do it on a CO-NW combination and post them to the same account, though.

I think that for back-to-back tickets, you buy 2 round trips- one from EWR to DFW leaving the Monday you want to go there (return date doesn't matter) and one from DFW to EWR the following Friday. Again, return date doesn't matter. You don't use the return flight on either ticket. Despite that, the round trip with Saturday stay for 2 trips is generally less than Monday-Friday in full fare Coach.

Again, a violation of the rules and fairly easy for them to catch. I've occasionally not used the return portion of a round trip (another violation called "throwaway ticketing") but they don't seem to get too crazy anout that unless there's a pattern of it.

[This message has been edited by Athena53 (edited Jan 14, 2004).]