Open-Jaw Flights: Our Favorite Way to See More

Most people book a flight the same way: round trip, same airport out and back. For our longer trips, that is the one thing we almost never do. We fly into one city and home from a different one. The airlines call it an open-jaw ticket, and somewhere along the way it quietly became the backbone of how we plan.

The problem it solves is backtracking. On a two- or three-week trip, we almost never want to sit in a single city the whole time; there is simply too much we want to see. But a round-trip ticket makes a quiet demand on your itinerary: however far you roam, you have to end up back where you started, ready to fly home. That usually means giving up a precious day, or paying for an extra internal flight, just to loop back to the airport you flew into. Open-jaw erases that. You move in one direction the whole trip and fly home from wherever you land last.

Here is how we actually build one. We start with a list of the places we genuinely want to go, not the ones that happen to share an airport. Then we hold that list up against flight prices and look for a way to string them together: fly into the first place, make our way to the last, and fly home from there. The route follows what we want to see, instead of bending everything back toward a single starting point.

Europe is where this really shines. Flying between countries there is often shockingly cheap, sometimes less than a nice lunch, which means we are never boxed in by geography. We are not afraid to pick two destinations we love that aren't remotely next to each other and simply fly between them in the middle of the trip. A week in one country, a short hop, a week somewhere completely different, and home from the second one. No day lost, no circling back.

People assume two different airports must cost more, and in our experience it rarely does. An open-jaw fare often prices close to a round trip, and once you account for the internal flight or the wasted day a round trip would have cost you, it frequently comes out ahead. Most booking sites let you search it directly under a "multi-city" option, so it is easier to price than it sounds.

We started doing this on our very first international trip, when we flew into San José, Costa Rica and home out of Liberia without ever doubling back. We have never planned a long trip differently since. Every multi-week summer trip we have taken has been open-jaw, because when you have saved up for weeks away, the last thing you want is to spend any of those days retracing your own steps.

That is really the whole case for it. Open-jaw isn't a hack or a loophole; it's just the flexibility to build the trip you actually want. It lets the itinerary chase the good stuff and lets you spend your days moving forward, seeing more, instead of protecting a round-trip ticket that wants you to end right where you began.