This simply doesn't make economic sense.

[randomness]

It is kind of odd when two one way flights are cheaper than a round trip to and from the same airports on the same days.

Not unheard of, but odd.

Comments

[theloriest.livejournal.com]

I know I've encountered it myself, too, so yeah... not unheard of. But yeah... odd.

[drwex]

It does make sense if the flights are on different airlines or on different equipment. It's costly to pre-position equipment so if you have to fly a plane to a location anyway it makes the most sense to reduce your losses (by dropping per-seat fares) rather than holding the line on prices and flying with empty seats.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

All of that is true, but for fare comparison engines not to return the one-way pair as a cheaper result is in my opinion a problem.

[drwex]

My guess is that it's a search optimization. By removing one-way flights the search can be done much faster. As you noted, it's rare that two one-ways is cheaper so it's generally a reasonable optimization, I think.

[nathanjw]

Not even close, as it turns out. Searching for a cheap one-way from A->B and a cheap one-way from B->A is vastly faster than searching for a cheap round trip from A->B->A; enough so that if you're doing the latter the former is in the noise. In the former case you do two (relatively) simple searches, but the combinatorial complexity of the latter (particularly as regards the airline fare rules) is much, much worse.

(I work on Google Flight Search, with a bunch of the people and software that Google absorbed from ITA Software. Our job would be much, much easier if composing one-way flights made sense most of the time.)

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Repositioning is one of the reasons I can think of for it, that and the fact that you get more security scrutiny on a one-way ticket than a two-way ticket. But why security scrutiny would equate a price difference is beyond me. I mean you're right, usually return tickets are cheaper than two one-ways on any number of systems.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah. In any case the bus is cheaper and only two hours longer (time which is eaten up by security, etc.) so I will be taking that instead.

I didn't really want to fly to Montreal via Toronto and back via Philadelphia anyway.

[frotz.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's even a difference in security scrutiny anymore. I fly rather too much, and (for all of the reasons above) on one-way tickets more often than not, but I haven't ever been tagged for special screening, even on short-notice international tickets.

Speaking of which, the market on short-notice tickets lately has been absurdly soft, too. Most weekdays it looks like I can come up with some sort of cross-continental next-day ticket for somewhere around $225-250. I assume that'll dry up when the summer travel season heats up, but for now there's just more capacity than demand and they trying to drag asses into seats at any price.

(As always, the best way to make a small fortune with an airline seems to be to start with a large fortune.)

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Is that one or two way?

[frotz.livejournal.com]

That's each way. (Huh, even for the weekend. My standard search is Boston to the SF bay; I could go to SF tomorrow for $271 and fly back Saturday for $259. Adding a month to the search window (so, mid-June), same days of the week, and it's still over $200. In both cases early-in-the-week weekdays are cheaper.)

[frotz.livejournal.com]

Sure. Other useful things to know: the market changes quickly. For the kinds of high-flux domestic stuff I usually deal with, I'll be checking often and booking quickly if availability opens up; odds are anything really shiny will be gone in 20 minutes. On the bright side, you usually have a day to change your mind, since for the most part anyone selling airline tickets in the US is required by law to give you 24 hours of wiggle room. Airlines do this differently, though; on Delta, say, you can just go to the web site within 24 hours, put in your PNR, and click "cancel", and they'll refund you. On American, though, once you buy the ticket there is no going back, but they will give you a 24-hour hold for free. JetBlue and United also do 24-hour refunds, but last I checked they required a phone call and a long time on hole to cancel. (The 24-hour law also doesn't apply if you're booking something less than a week out, but many airlines keep is as a blanket policy.) Alaska is super-awesome; not only can you cancel online, but if the fare goes down between booking and your flight, you can go click something that says "hey, it got cheaper, give me a credit for the difference!" Booking near the beginning of the week (Monday-Wednesday is the usual advice, but I've found Sunday sometimes good) is usually better than other times; there's a recent WSJ article about this that's interesting reading, but I think it amounts to "there's less competition from leisure travelers who think about it on weekends, airline fare sales traditionally get posted on Tuesday, and the people at the airlines who otherwise manage capacity are at work on weekdays and actively opening up cheaper capacity to get asses in seats".

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

That's also cheaper than the round-trip.

Two one-ways:

BOS->SFO, Thursday 15 May
$271, American (PHL) or AirTran (ATL)

SFO->BOS, Saturday 17 May
$258, Sun Country (MSP)

Total: $529

Cheapest displayed round-trip:
BOS-PHL-SFO, SFO-DFW-BOS
$542, American