How to save big money - by booking one-way flight tickets

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At InsideFlyer, we always aim to challenge the conventional approach when it comes to securing great value travel. One very good example is the automatic purchasing of return flight tickets. Understandably, most of us book return tickets for trips without really thinking about it, not least because the consensus view is that it’s the cheapest way to go. Indeed, usually it is.

But not always.

If you break down return flights into 2 one-way tickets, you’ll start to notice that the cost is rarely split 50/50. The reason is simple: when pricing international tickets, airlines have a good sense for how much different people are willing to pay. They know that somebody from, say, the UK will be willing (and maybe able) to pay more to fly to an exotic Madagascan holiday than a local Madagascan resident is likely to pay to come to the UK. Currency matters and the airlines know how much they can charge to fill a plane.

So, when you break the tickets down to one-way segments, you will almost always find the flight departing from the ‘more expensive’ country costs a lot more than the return.

Hippo watching in Mzuke Game Reserve, KZN

We are currently on holiday in South Africa, and our tickets for this trip were a perfect example. We had some air miles to use, but also needed to get busy earning our share of American Airlines miles for the year. So, we decided to split the travel spend between air miles and paid tickets. You can read about how we tactically booked flights using our air miles here. For the paid flights, Qatar & Etihad both allow passengers to earn AA miles and were about the cheapest flights available.

However, here is why the direction is important to pay attention to:

Below are flights for May from Edinburgh to Johannesburg on Qatar:

Roughly £665 for a one way ticket.

Now look at flights, on the exact same dates, coming the other direction (Johannesburg to Edinburgh):

Coming this way, the flights cost right around R5150 which is about £250 – less than half the cost!

Now when spending air miles for ‘free flights’, aside from small differences in taxes, the cost in miles is always the same regardless of direction. Flights are priced by region or distance, so whether you fly EDI-JNB or JNB-EDI it is the same.

Therefore, for this trip, it made a lot more sense to use air miles to fly down (it cost 30k miles and around $25 each in taxes) and then pay to fly home and earn miles at a low cost.

Here’s the route home, actually on Etihad, all for around £250pp. Since Etihad don’t fly from Cape Town, we booked a separate internal flight with BA from CPT-JNB for next to nothing, around £60pp.