What Advantages can I get from Open Jaw Itinerary?

First of all, let me explain you what an open jaw itinerary is. All you need to do is open your jaws in front of an employee, and you’ll immediately get a free ticket.

No, just kidding! Well, that was kinda lame, I’ll admit.

Anyways, I have explained you all about the stopovers in this post where you would be able to ask an airline to extend your layover into a stopover, so you can explore the destination of the layover before flying to your final destination. This one is a little different.

An open jaw is when you fly home from a different destination compared to the one you flew to at the beginning of your trip. I know this can be confusing. I’ll give you some examples, which I believe will help give you a better visualization.

Let’s say you have a round trip that departs from your hometown in Austin, Texas, to the destination Paris, France. After you have finished your wonderful vacation or business trip, you can request for an open jaw flight, which means that you would like to depart to a different location. You have to call your airline before you purchase the ticket though to let them know that you’d like to return to Hawaii or somewhere else you’d like to be at. Most airlines usually approve such requests.

Now you might be concerned about fare construction. If you’re changing the destination you depart to, it may increase the cost of that flight ticket. Before I start explaining to you about fares, you need to understand that an open jaw can be only eligible if you’re purchasing a round trip ticket in the first place. Now those round-trip prices are usually cheaper than purchasing two one-way tickets, from what I’ve learned, it’s often half the cost. How is that possible?

Okay I did my research on the Internet. I found a few sample trips that can illustrate the prices for you:

1. Chicago (ORD) to Santiago (SCL), and Buenos Aires (EZE) to ORD, for midweek flights in April:
   1. Round-trip ORD to SCL: $996
   2. Round-trip ORD to EZE: $942
   3. Open-jaw ORD to SCL, plus EZE to ORD: $832

Now you can see how cheaper an open-jaw route is; you pay less for more!! Isn’t this amazing? Let me show you some more samples.

1. San Francisco (SFO) to Stockholm (ARN), and London (LHR) to SFO
   1. Round-trip SFO to ARN: $1,120
   2. Round-trip SFO to LHR: $1,171
   3. Open-jaw SFO to ARN, plus LHR to SFO: $1,202

That one is a bit pricier, but it shows the small difference is far less than you thought you’d have to pay to fly back from London to Stockholm to catch a return flight. The point is, you are able to save more money if you want to visit several more destinations. I highly recommend you to use the open jaw method if you’re traveling internationally. But when traveling in the United States, you don’t really benefit much from an open jaw itinerary because the price difference between a round trip and one-way fare isn’t much. So, now that you know about this tidbit, go out and explore more! To see the ASL version of this post, please go to our Facebook video post.