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Most travelers book round-trip flights and waste precious vacation time returning to their departure city. Open-jaw routing saves hours without costing more.
You're on day eight of a ten-day Italy trip, sitting in a Venice café, when it hits you: tomorrow you have to reverse everything you just did. Florence again. Then Rome. Not to see them—just to catch your flight home. Two full days spent backtracking to your departure city, retracing a path you already walked.
Most people book flights the same way: enter Rome, exit Rome. It feels automatic. Round-trip searches are the default on every booking site. But that symmetry costs something travelers rarely calculate until they're living it—time. And unlike flight price differences, lost vacation time doesn't show up in a comparison table.
Traditional round-trip routing forces you into a geographic loop. If you fly into Rome and out of Rome, every destination you visit becomes a spoke on a wheel. You can venture to Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast—but eventually, everything has to circle back to the hub. For linear itineraries (Rome to Florence to Venice), this creates an obvious problem: your route naturally moves north, but your departure airport pulls you south again.
The overnight train becomes the "romantic" workaround. Except it's not. It's an additional expense, an uncomfortable sleep, and eight hours you could have spent literally anywhere else. Research from the Journal of Travel Research found that travelers consistently undervalue travel time when making cost decisions—treating a full day of transit as equivalent to maybe $50 in savings.
But that day isn't worth $50. It's worth whatever you would have done instead: another morning in Venice, an extra afternoon in the Tuscan hills, sleeping in your own bed a night earlier. On a ten-day trip, losing two days to logistics means you actually had an eight-day vacation.
Open-jaw flights let you fly into one city and out of another. Rome in, Venice out. The route becomes a line instead of a loop. Most booking engines bury this option under "multi-city" search, which makes it sound complicated and expensive. It's neither.
When you search "multi-city," you're not booking separate tickets—you're booking a single itinerary with different origin and destination points. Airlines have been offering this for decades, often at the same price as round-trips or within a small margin. A 2023 analysis from Thrifty Traveler found that 60% of open-jaw routings in Europe cost the same or less than their round-trip equivalents when accounting for positioning transport.
The reason is route economics. Airlines care about filling seats, not about your geographic preferences. A Rome-New York flight on Tuesday and a Venice-New York flight on Thursday are equally valuable to them. Sometimes open-jaw routings are even cheaper—Venice might have better load factors on your departure day, making that leg less expensive than a Rome departure.
Linear routes are the obvious candidates. Any itinerary where you're traveling in one direction benefits: London to Paris to Barcelona. Bangkok to Chiang Mai to Phuket. The California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco. If your trip has a natural start and end point that aren't the same place, open-jaw routing matches your actual travel pattern.
Multi-country trips show even clearer advantages. Flying into Bangkok and out of Singapore eliminates the question of whether to backtrack or buy an expensive intra-Asia positioning flight. Enter through Iceland, exit through London—your transatlantic routing now includes two countries instead of duplicating one.
The decision gets simpler when you calculate "vacation hours saved" against "flight dollars spent." If an open-jaw ticket costs $75 more but saves you ten hours of travel time, you're valuing your vacation time at $7.50 per hour. Most people, when asked directly, would pay more than that to add half a day to their trip.
Hub-and-spoke itineraries don't benefit from open-jaw routing. If you're using Rome as a base and taking day trips to Orvieto, Tivoli, and Ostia, you're returning to Rome every night anyway. The flight structure should match the trip structure.
Round-trips also make sense when positioning transport is cheap and easy. If the train from Venice to Rome is €29 and takes three hours, and the open-jaw flight costs €150 more, the math doesn't work. But these situations are rarer than people think—positioning transport adds time, coordination, and the risk of delays between legs.
There's also the comfort factor of knowing exactly where you'll end up. Some travelers prefer the psychological symmetry of departing from the same place they arrived, even if it requires backtracking. That's a legitimate preference, as long as it's a conscious choice rather than a default assumption.
Europe makes open-jaw routing almost too easy. Dense flight networks, competitive pricing, and short distances mean the fare difference is usually minimal. Budget carriers like Ryanair and EasyJet often make multi-city tickets cheaper than repositioning yourself by train.
Asia depends heavily on hub economics. Flying into Tokyo and out of Osaka works beautifully—they're different cities connected by excellent rail. But flying into Bangkok and out of Hanoi might cost significantly more unless you're routing through a hub that serves both well. Check Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, or Hong Kong as connection points.
The U.S. can be surprisingly expensive for open-jaw routing, particularly for domestic trips. The legacy carrier pricing model penalizes non-round-trip tickets more than European or Asian airlines do. But even here, road trips are the exception: flying into Seattle and out of San Diego after driving the Pacific Coast Highway costs less than buying a one-way ticket back to Seattle or paying for a week-long car rental drop fee.
Most booking sites default to round-trip searches because they're simpler to display and compare. To find open-jaw options, look for "multi-city" or "multiple destinations" in the search type selector—usually a small link near the round-trip toggle.
Enter your first flight as normal: departure city to first destination. Then add a second flight: final destination to home city. Leave the dates open if you're flexible—sometimes shifting by a day or two eliminates the price premium entirely.
Google Flights handles this particularly well, showing a calendar grid of prices for different date combinations. ITA Matrix (now owned by Google) offers even more powerful routing options if you want to get specific about connection cities and airlines. Kayak and Skyscanner both surface multi-city options, though their interfaces bury them under extra menus.
If the open-jaw routing costs more, try adjusting airports. Sometimes flying out of a nearby city—Bologna instead of Venice, or Girona instead of Barcelona—brings the price back in line. Regional airports often have better availability and lower taxes.
The cheapest flight isn't always the cheapest trip. A $400 round-trip that requires two days of backtracking costs more than a $450 open-jaw ticket that doesn't—you're just paying the extra $50 in time instead of money. And time, on vacation, is the scarcest resource you have.
Travel planning tools are starting to recognize this. Better itinerary systems can now calculate total trip cost including positioning transport, helping travelers see the real comparison instead of just the ticket price. It's the kind of insight that's obvious once someone points it out, but invisible when you're staring at a grid of round-trip fares.
This is exactly the kind of optimization that makes the difference between a trip that feels rushed and one that feels spacious—not because you added more days, but because you stopped spending them inefficiently.
Before you book your next round-trip flight, pull up a map. Draw the route you're actually planning to travel. If it's a loop that returns to your starting point naturally, round-trip makes sense. But if it's a line—a path with a clear direction and a different ending—check what an open-jaw ticket costs.
The price difference might be zero. It might be $50. It's unlikely to be more than $100 unless you're routing through particularly expensive airports. And in exchange, you get back something you can't buy more of: vacation time that isn't spent retracing your steps.
Your itinerary shouldn't force you backward just because that's how the booking form defaulted. Most trips have a natural flow. Let your flights follow it.
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