A neat trick for finding deals on open jaw trips
 

Open jaw trips involve flying to one city and returning from another. We were trying to find the best price for such a trip in first class but it isn't easy. You have to constantly check back to see if prices have gone down. Almost all web sites don't remember the specifics of such a flight so finding the price on an airline site or third party (like Orbitz) and saving the resulting search is problematic. In addition, some sites wil notify you of price changes but not so for open jaw flights. However, I found a solution.

It turns out that Expedia is the only site I could find that remembers the exact settings (including seat class, number of travelers, airline preferences, time of travel preferences, etc.) of a search. Thus, one can bookmark (favorite) the search and can check it over and over coming up with the exact same parameters. Of course, that only tells you the information for a specific set of dates and you have to keep checking to see when fares go down for your trip date.

Using this, here is what I did:

1) I saved the settings for my trip date as a book mark and noted the price 6 months before travel. Best price was $1600 ATL to ANC and SEA to ATL.

2) I modified the dates a week at a time until I found a better price (under $1500) that I could go for. I saved that setting as a new bookmark. I then moved forward a week and saved that setting ($1600).

3) Each week I would check the two "test" prices by simply clicking the bookmarked links. I noted that the next week, the price for the second test went down. So I moved my tests forward a week. I would also click on my travel date bookmark but it remained the same.

4) I edited the dates forward each week. I noted that prices would drop about 6 weeks ahead of the set dates.

5) About 5 weeks ahead of travel, the price dropped not only for that week but for the next week and dropped even more than the original $1500 - to under $1400!

6) The next week, sure enough, my dates dropped to that price and I booked. Normally, my policy is to use the third party if the trip involves multiple airlines but use the airline site if it is only one. However, although the deal was all Delta, the Delta site had the original $1600 price even as Expedia showed sub $1400 for the same flights. I booked Expedia and immediately checked my itinerary on Delta's site to verify. It was good. I now had my First Class seats at a great price.

Note that changing the dates in the bookmark can be done by simply changing the dates after clicking the link and saving the changes as a new bookmark but since it is not that difficult to read and modify URLs in a bookmark, I simply edited the dates. I named the bookmarks "Low Trip Week", "High Trip Week" and "Actual Trip Date" so I would know which to select and/or edit. Since the city codes are in the URL, I could check other cities by, e.g. changing the ATL in the URL to CLT for Charlotte (shown below with dates changed for privacy).

Outgoing flight is in RED
Return is in BLUE
Flight Class in Green (1=First Class, 3 would be economy)

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thanks - great timesaver
 

Thanks for the great tip. I wish more websites had a complete link that could be saved like Expedia does.

It just saved me a couple of bucks on a car rental from last week.

Kayak does save searched for OJ trips if you log in

Good search engine for finding open jaw tickets?
 

Quite frequently I buy open jaw tickets and I usually find them through Swedish search engine www.flygresor.se and then I buy the tickets from Online Travel Agencies. This is all good except that if I want to pay with credit card I need to pay 10-15 Euros extra. In order to avoid this fee I would like to buy the tickets from an OTA in another country (I do this often when purchasing regular round trip tickets). Anybody know of a good search engine for open jaw trips? I know Kayak can do open jaw searches, but the search results are usually pretty poor compared to what I can find on www.flygresor.se

The only thing that comes to mind is ITA Matrix, however, as discussed in the linked thread (ITA Matrix [ITA Software]), it presently experiences many issues.

You may wish to read this article: Search for Cheaper "Open Jaw" Flights with ITA Matrix

I think https://vamo.com could help you. It makes searching open-jaw ticket as easy as adding two cities to your trip. If the flight you want happens to be available on Expedia or the partner websites, it will also send you directly to the booking link.

Here is some more information about Vamo:

Travel Tools for Open Jaw Flights?
 

What tools do you use to help you find flights for open jaw flights?

I'm a newbie, and I just found about ITA Matrix but I'm having trouble figuring out how to do open jaw flights that proceed in a certain order.

I'll be going to Europe for the first time in May and I want to see London and Paris. Since London is further up north and colder than Paris, I figured that I would want to see Paris first and then see London after that as London gets warmer.

According to Lifehacker, I should be able to arrange the order by putting CDG, LHR in the Destination box:

http://lifehacker.com/search-for-che...rix-1579047837

But, I'm getting non-open jaw flights. Is there a way to filter that out?

And, even when I do get open jaw flights, its from LA to London and then from Paris to LA.

So, I get that it'd be cheaper to fly from LA to London instead of Paris, but I want to see how much more expensive it'd be to fly from LA to Paris first.

What am I doing wrong?

And, is there a better tool to find open jaw flights than ITA Matrix?

Thanks

joshing,

Welcome to FlyerTalk.

I've merged your question into an exiting thread on this topic. Please take a look as some of the earlier posts for suggestions.

If you are still having trouble finding open jaw flights using ITA Matrix, you'll probably have more success getting help in the following thread:
TWA884
Travel Tools moderator