In 2015 I was thrown into traveling around the world for my work, both doing my own job and covering for a colleague with an injury. I had already been to Poland, India and South Korea, next was a trip around South Africa.
The Schedule was to spend a week in Johannesburg, then 3 days in Durban and 3 days in Cape Town. My first thought was to purchase a return ticket to Johannesburg and then a round trip between the 3 cities. But I decided to experiment and see what the cost of flying London to Johannesburg and Cape Town to London would be. Turned out it was the same price as the straight return ticket. This was because it was an “open jaw ticket”.
What is an open jaw ticket?
This is a return ticket where you book from one starting point out to a destination and fly home from a different location back to the same starting point. You will have noticed that return flights are always cheaper than buying singles, well open jaw tickets allow you to buy single tickets, but at return pricing. They only work if you are flying out and back from the same zone of the world, like my trip above, where I flew to and from South Africa. You couldn’t, for example, book a ticket for London to New York as your outbound and Hong Kong to London as your return. Generally, you should always be flying out and back in the same direction. So, London to New York and then Orlando to London would be allowed. I’ve used this ticket type many times to travel around Asia and the Americas.
Here is a working example, let’s say you need to do a trip to Singapore and Tokyo, back-to-back. In this example I’ve found prices in Premium Economy with British Airways for Feb 2025.
The return trip for London – Singapore is £1893
The return trip for London – Tokyo is £1600
The open jaw ticket for London – Singapore and Tokyo – London is £1860
Note the ticket does not include getting from Singapore to Tokyo, more about that later.
How do I book an open jaw ticket?
Personally, I always start on www.google.co.uk/travel/flights/
Then I pick the multi-city option. After that you can filter by alliance or airline, which means you can see all the options and find what you want.
For most airlines when you go to their booking page you have the option to book single, return or multi-city tickets, select this last option to begin. On BA it’s called a “Multi City & Round the World” ticket.
Here’s what the BA website looks like:
Once you have completed the form it will take you to the pages where you choose your specific flights. The good thing about the second page is you can mix and match cabins, so if you want to go out in Business but return in Premium Economy, that’s entirely possible. Just make sure you start by selecting the lowest class you want to use on the first form, (that’s an option that appears on the form above, not shown.)
Why don’t I book all my flights at once?
I mentioned earlier that on this fictional Singapore/Tokyo trip I wouldn’t book the middle flight between the two. Whilst this is possible using the multi-flight booking, it will put your price through the roof. It is always best to book your main outbound and return legs as one booking and then any interim trips as totally separate bookings.
As I always like to make sure I get my points and use my frequent flying benefits, I will always look for a One World airline in the region I am working in to fly with. For this example trip the obvious choice would be JAL, Japanese Airlines, who are a One World member. I would get all my benefits, lounge access etc and I would collect tier points and AVIOS for flying with them, as long as I declared my BA member number when booking or checking in. It is possible to collect points after flying, but it’s slow and of course you’d miss out on all the benefits when actually flying!
There are other tricks you can use when you do trips like this, which can also help you get more points. Instead of flying JAL for my trip from Singapore to Tokyo, what if I used Cathay Pacific, another One World airline? Cathey are based in Hong Kong, so to do the trip I would need to stop over in Hong Kong, probably on a connecting flight. It would take longer, but it would give me more tier points and AVIOS as it’s two flights, plus I get to stop in Hong Kong which has a great airport with some very nice lounges. On longer trips in the past, I’ve used this technique to stop over in Hong Kong for whole weekends, meaning I get to visit friends and pop into a certain Disney park on my weekends, but that’s a whole different blog.
Flying around South Africa
Back to my South Africa trip, I’d booked London – Johannesburg and Cape Town – London, next I needed to sort the internal flights. At the time there was a British Airways franchise in South Africa operated by Comair. This meant it looked completely like you were flying BA, but it was actually another company operating it. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing, this service was suspended during the pandemic with no sign of it returning.
Turning Bronze
I booked Johannesburg to Durban and Durban to Cape Town, all with BA. This was the first time I realised that my frequent flying was going to become a thing for me. South Africa was my third major trip and I had progressed from Blue to Bronze with BA. Bronze doesn’t give you very many perks, but you do get priority check in, early seat choice and priority boarding. It’s just enough to tease you into wanting to earn more to get to the next level, which is what happened to me. I was standing in the queue at the gate for my first internal flight from Johannesburg, when a member of staff walked down the queue asking for Gold, Silver or Bronze members, so I put my hand up. He then ushered me to a much shorter queue for priority boarding. I mentioned I was traveling with a colleague, and he pointed out that everyone travelling with me also benefitted from my status.
This is a trick I’ve used many times since, it mostly applies to check in and boarding, but if you have people with you on the same flight, even if they are on separate bookings, you can usually all check in and board with you if you have status to do so. It doesn’t always work on fast-track security, but that is not unusual because security staff don’t work for your airline. And don’t forget, if you have lounge access, you can usually take one guest with you, as long as they are flying on a flight in the same alliance as you, it doesn’t even have to be the same flight!
Going for gold
This experience made me look up more detail on what the different levels gave you and it certainly gave me the drive to progress.
After South Africa my flying continued, even more intensely. I jumped very quickly from Bronze, through Silver to Gold. In fact, I jumped so fast that I reached Gold status before my Silver card even arrived in the post. In total it took me six months of continuous flying to go from no points in Blue to a lot of points in Gold.
Part 3
In the next part I will talk about finding a good deal and why I didn’t fly BA or One World for a pretty major trip, read part 3 here.
