bigbuggie

Sorry I'm new to travel hacking and I'm a bit confused about this topic. I've read blogs where people would purposely buy airplane tickets that stop in 2 or more countries and visit those 2 stops at their leisure. Isn't he talking about the same thing?

DC777Fan

What I *think* you're talking about is a ~23 hour "layover" built in to a trip to visit an extra place. Many airlines will allow layovers up to 23hr59min on international tickets, so folks will build in a few of these to visit extra cities. Personally, I don't think it's worth it, but I can see how others do.

That said, it's perfectly within the airline rules, and while perhaps not exactly what they intend for you to do, it doesn't violate any rules.

bigbuggie

It sounded like he was doing it for longer but maybe I misunderstood. This is one of the blogs where I was reading it from.http://freakinflyers.com/stopovers/ He talks about stopovers and open jaws.

Leopold

The author is talking about reward tickets on various airlines.

bigbuggie

Do award tickets let you have longer stopovers or are the rules different from regular flights?

Leopold

The rules vary, for both awards and paid fares.

kevinsac

Many years ago, we were booking flights SFO-ATH. F was in the range of $6000 each way.

I was playing around, trying to get the prices down. Was surprised to find out SFO-FRA was $8000 each way. Even booking on the exact same SFO-FRA-SFO flights, by continuing FRA-ATH-FRA brought the price down $2000 each direction.

Go figure.

zipo

Diff airlines react diff to the hidden airport trick

Alex_I

Few comments:
1) Flights to/from SJC to Hawaii are usually cheaper vs. SFO because of competition (e.g., AS is flying to some of the islands non-stop).
2) At least some of us would not mind logging in two extra segments (SFO-LAX-SJC) for extra redeemable and qualifications miles and saving $150!
3) If you still like to skip the last two legs, try booking your tickets with the minimal connection time at SFO (perhaps, 30 min? - I do not know what is the legal connection time for UA at SFO) If you miss your connecting SFO-LAX flight, you would have some good chances to talk the gate agent to get off your trip at SFO without being accommodated at a later flight.
4) If you book way in advance, there is a good chance that the schedule would change. If changes are > 2 hrs you would have a good case to ask the airline to reroute you to another city (like SFO). Once I have asked AA and was rerouted from DFW-WAS to DFW-RIC simply because of the schedule change for the original flights.

Of course, 3) and 4) are about taking chances but SJC<->SFO is not such a big deal.

Doc Savage

OP, just don't check any bags and you can get off at SFO with no hassles.

Just don't do it multiple times and the airline really won't care.

jackal

Yup.

It sort of works like this:

UA has a near-monopoly on the KOA-SFO route, so fares are high.

AS files a semi-cheap sale fare on their KOA-SJC nonstop.

UA is scanning their competitors' fares one day and sees this. They think, "Crap; we're losing business on the KOA-SJC city pair. We'd better file a matching fare." They do.

Then, the UA fare-filing people look at their network. They notice they don't have any KOA-SJC nonstops. The fare for that city pair exists and they want the business; now they have to figure out how to get people between the two cities.

They make a list of all of the possible ways to get from KOA to SJC on their network. Probably the most obvious is KOA-LAX-SJC (they have a direct KOA-LAX flight). But they have to be thorough, because they don't want to miss any opportunities to snag the price-sensitive people away from AS, so they want to publish a routing that allows travel on KOA-SFO, too (since that's the route that has the most seats available). Unfortunately, there aren't any SFO-SJC flights (it's too short!). So, what's the fastest way to get to SJC from SFO? Via LAX. And boom, you have it!

KOA-SFO-LAX-SJC

For what it's worth, here's the routing as filed on a typical UA KOA-SJC fare:

1. KOA-HNL/ITO/LAX/SFO-LAX/SFO-SJC

That breaks into this:

[KOA] --> [HNL or ITO or LAX or SFO] --> [LAX or SFO] --> SJC

Now obviously, the most logical routing permitted by the fare is KOA-LAX-SJC (the fare-booking engine can skip a step). Second to that would probably be KOA-HNL-LAX-SJC or maybe KOA-ITO-LAX-SJC (if the KOA-LAX nonstop is sold out). But you can see how the fare rules actually do permit the KOA-SFO-LAX-SJC routing. Even though it makes absolutely no sense to most people why two extra segments would be $150 cheaper, now you know that it has absolutely nothing to do with the fare that's filed on the KOA-SFO nonstop flight and everything to do with the competition in the KOA-SJC market...and the reason you can get on the same plane and pay less by going on to somewhere else is mostly due to fact that UA's route network allows (and/or even in some cases requires) your itinerary to follow a particular route, even if others getting off earlier are paying more.

That help?

YXXFlyer

Cool, thanks! I really appreciate all insight into the back-office processes that underpin my hobby