Very common for frequent flyers who understand this stuff.

It's a bit like buying RTW fares and using them over the course of a year for trips.. Or buying flights from Australia to the US (or UK when NZ flew there) when you're NZ based.

In 2018/2019 when it was very common for Air NZ to advertise sales in Australia with PE and BP sales to the US and UK that were often thousands cheaper than booking from NZ I mentioned this to a friend who then started booking several trips this way.

He'd book a R/T SYD-LAX and then book a one way positioning ticket to SYD. The result was frequent trips to Aussie that were actually free and saving him money vs buying AKL-LAX fares.

ie Jan - > Fly AKL-SYD-AKL for the weekend

Feb -> Fly AKL-LAX-AKL for a planned work trip

Mar -> Fly AKL-SYD-AKL for the weekend with the flight from SYD-AKL being the first sector of his next US trip a couple of months later.


He also flew to LHR and threw away the last sector back to SYD