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Flight Booking

How to Book an Open-Jaw Flight Deal

Scott Keyes

Scott Keyes

December 19, 2023

2 min read

An open-jaw flight arrives in one city and departs from another. Important: you’re responsible for getting between the cities on your own!

 For example:

  • Flight 1 of 2: New York → London
  • Train/car/bus/separate flight, etc.: London → Paris  
  • Flight 2 of 2: Paris → New York

Open-jaw flights are fantastic for seeing two destinations in one trip without backtracking to your initial destination to catch a flight home. 

When a deal we send works as an open-jaw, we’ll call that out. Here’s how to book.

Step 1: Click the booking button in the deal email

Every deal email includes a direct link that’s pre-set with all the filters needed to get the fares we’ve found to appear in the search results.

Explore available dates until you find an itinerary you like. Note: you may need to customize your search details, such as dates, trip duration, number of travelers, etc.

Step 2: Switch your flight type to “multi-city”

Look for a dropdown menu where you can select the type of trip and select multi-city flights. 

Then take the dates you like from Step 1 and plug them in, along with the cities you want to fly to and from. If the order of the cities doesn’t matter, try running the search both ways to see if it changes the price.  

Selecting Multi-City in Google Flights.

Step 3: Book via the airline or an online travel agency

Scott’s Cheap Flights doesn’t sell flights; all flights must be booked directly through the airline or an online travel agency.

Online travel agencies often have the lowest available prices for our deals. When this occurs, we’ll call it out in the Booking Instructions section of the email. When the price is similar, we recommend booking directly with the airline

Not only does this give you more flexibility (you can generally cancel or change your flight within 24 hours), it’s also typically easier to resolve any issues when you deal directly with the airline vs a third party. 

For detailed instructions on how to use the most common online travel agencies or flight search engines, check out these guides, or read our guide to online travel agencies.

Step 4: Book transport between the two cities

An open-jaw flight flies into one city and out of another, which means it’s up to you to get between those cities, whether that’s by plane, train, bus, car, or ferry. 

Rome2rio is an excellent resource for figuring out the best way between two points. It shows you all your transport options along with the duration, cost, and booking details. 

Can’t find the fare quoted in the deal alert email?

If you’ve followed the instructions above (use that booking button!) and still can’t find the deal, double check the dates and route (departure and destination airports) in the deal email to make sure the dates you’re searching for are listed. For an open-jaw flight, you can also play around the order of cities. If you still can’t find the deal, it’s most likely no longer available. 

If you have a question about a deal, please contact us and we’ll be happy to take a look at what’s going on.

Scott Keyes

Scott Keyes

Founder & Chief Flight Expert

Scott Keyes is the Founder and Chief Flight Expert of Going (formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights), an app for flight deal alerts. He launched the service after spotting a $130 roundtrip fare from New York to Milan in 2013 and turned that discovery into a hobby of alerting friends to exceptional flight deals. Within two years, he formalized the email list into a business, culminating in the 2015 founding of the email service that has grown to serve more than 2 million members, sending them flight alerts for cheap flight tickets and mistake fares to destinations worldwide.

 

With a background in journalism and an education from Stanford University, Keyes spent years investigating airfare pricing, airline yield management, and consumer booking behavior. He worked with the Going team to build a mobile app, launched in 2024, that scans thousands of routes and publishes curated low‑fare alerts. The community has saved members over $1 billion in airfare in ten years, according to Mercury. His insights and story have been featured in The Washington Post, CNBC, Yahoo, Fortune, and more, where he has shared data-driven strategies on airline pricing patterns and booking optimization.

 

Alongside his role at Going, Keyes authored the book Take More Vacations: How to Search Better, Book Cheaper, and Travel the World (Harper Wave, 2021), which presents his methodology and encourages travelers to prioritize price‑first trips rather than destination‑first. Through speaking engagements and media commentary, he is widely cited as an authority on how to secure mistake fares, fare drops, and unadvertised deals.

 

Keyes is based in Portland, Oregon. His work bridges data‑driven airfare analytics with travel psychology, and he is committed to making global travel more affordable and accessible.


Last updated December 19, 2023

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