What an open jaw ticket is
If you’re planning to visit two or more destinations on a single trip, the open jaw ticket (also known as an open ticket) is the ideal choice and can save you a lot of time and money. Let’s show how an open jaw ticket works with a practical example.
Say you’re planning to fly from Vienna to Rome, but for the return from Rome it works out better for you to fly into Prague.
As the example shows, with an open jaw ticket you fly into one city and fly home from another. But why would anyone do that? We’ll show you below with all the advantages.
The advantages of open jaw flights
With an open ticket you can turn your trip into a holiday across two or more destinations for a lower overall price. An open jaw ticket isn’t limited in the number of flights. Skyscanner, for instance, offers up to 6 combinations of different departure and arrival cities.
Types of open jaw flights
Destination open-jaw (the most common)
You fly from A to B, but fly back from C to A. Example: Prague → Lisbon | overland: Lisbon → Porto | Porto → Prague. It makes sense when you want to travel a coastline, do a one-way road trip and not return to the start.
Pros: Saves time, and often money on needless backtracking.
An example from experience: an ideal use for an open jaw flight is the walking pilgrimage to Santiago (read more about the pilgrimage we’ve walked twice). You always start the pilgrimage somewhere. Typically Porto, Lisbon, Bilbao and so on. Once you’ve walked the Camino you don’t want to go back, so you choose the airport in Santiago de Compostela.
- Pros: Saves time, and often money on needless backtracking.
- Cons: You have to arrange the transfer yourself between B and C (train, bus, car, on foot, on horseback.. whatever).
Origin open-jaw
You fly from A to B, and fly back from B to C (a different return point). It makes sense when you live between two airports (Prague/Vienna), or when the times and prices for returning to a different city work out better. That’s how we flew to Málaga from Prague and back to Vienna, for instance – purely because of the ticket price.
- Pros: More flexibility, sometimes a cheaper return.
- Cons: You need to sort out getting home from a different city.
Double open-jaw
Both the arrival point and the return departure point are different. It suits longer trips, combining regions, open-jaw across countries.
- Pros: Maximum freedom of route.
- Cons: Occasionally a more complicated fare structure and more logistics.
When is it worth looking at open jaw flights?
A road trip without the loop – you don’t want to go back to the start. Example: Porto → Lisbon along the coast, flying home from Lisbon. That saves you 1–2 days, and the shorter itinerary often makes up for the one-way car drop-off fee at a different branch.
Two cities for one flight. You want Madrid + Barcelona, Naples + Rome, Oslo + Bergen. You fly into the first and return from the second.
A clever combination of fares and low-cost carriers. Sometimes a main (long-haul) open-jaw ticket + a cheap domestic transfer (low-cost flight, train) is better value than a classic return.
Long-haul flights with several destinations – the US west coast (arrive SF, depart LA), Japan (arrive Tokyo, depart Osaka), Southeast Asia (arrive Bangkok, depart Singapore).
Better flight times / airports – sometimes the return from a different city is at a better time or from a nicer airport (you can happily avoid night transfers).
Seasonality – you arrive at A for an event (a festival, trekking season) and fly home from C, where the weather or price is better at that time.
Where to build open jaw tickets
I most often use 3 tools that I feel completely at home in! 🙂 The first is Skyscanner, where I book about 60 % of my flights. The second and third are Pelikan.cz (which, among other things, has the best flight deals section) and Azair.cz
Open jaw flight ideas
Spain – the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela
An ideal use for an open jaw flight is the walking pilgrimage to Santiago. You always start the pilgrimage somewhere. Typically Porto, Lisbon, Bilbao and so on. Once you’ve walked the Camino you don’t want to go back, so you choose the airport in Santiago de Compostela.
Portugal – discovering Faro, Lisbon and Porto
We really enjoyed Portugal on a multi-day visit to Porto. We didn’t have time to discover more of the country. But if we had, we’d have done a road trip along the coast from Faro through Lisbon up to Porto.
It’s pleasant on a road trip to keep moving forward and not hurry back to your arrival city on the last day.
Discovering Southeast Asia – Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam
When we travelled around Southeast Asia we were won over by AirAsia. How else but on price. By combining flights within an open jaw ticket we got to see almost all of Southeast Asia. Again we sorted all the tickets through Skyscanner.
To the Baltics! – Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn
See the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia thanks to an open jaw ticket. One day you fly into Vilnius in Lithuania, then move between the cities by bus for next to nothing, and a few days later fly home from Tallinn.
Summary of the key points
Besides the advantages mentioned, it has to be said that open jaw flights aren’t usable in every situation. Sometimes it’s simply better value to fly from the same airport. It all comes down to knowledge and information, which you get here first-hand.
