Flying in peak season? Get cheaper tickets or free one way added..

Are you looking to fly during Christmas, New Year or during peak summer dates? Most of us would have this dilemma of using the holidays for travel but paying exorbitant prices. This could be due to the limited vacation time or kids school being shut during this times. If you are the one who cannot avoid peak dates travel then below tricks might help at times.

Trick 1: Book two one-way tickets:
At times of low season this might be a completely bad suggestion, but when you are looking to fly in high season, this might be a neat way to reduce your flight cost. The reason being that most 3rd party aggregates and booking sits such as Expedia would want to issue a single ticket for your round trip. The simple reason being booking two separate one-way tickets would require separate cancellation/change fees if any of your plan to fly changes.

Although some times the 3rd party flight booking sites would display tickets as two one-way, the chances of that being efficient in time and cost is low. Below is an example of search with last minute peak season ticket where the round trip flight fare from SFO-DEL for low connection time jumps from ~$2095 to ~$2778.

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SFO-DEL-SFO from Dec 25th to Jan 2nd.

Below you can see what happens when we instead search above as two one-way tickets. The total fare for the round trip becomes ~$2160 which is much lower than booking a round trip ticket.

SFO-DEL Dec 25th one-way ticket

DEL-SFO Jan 2nd one-way ticket

Trick 2: Book one-way + round-trip ticket (tagging a free / almost free one-way ticket):
This is another neat trick which can help you get an additional one-way to the same original destination or if you are creative to the destination where you plan to visit in the future. The idea here is that instead of booking a round trip you book a one-way and add a round trip ticket from your destination to your source. For e.g. instead of booking "SFO-DEL-SFO" you can book "SFO-DEL" (one-way) + "DEL-SFO-DEL" (round trip). So for "SFO-DEL" one-way you would pay ~$931 and booking "DEL-SFO-DEL" round trip is just $1246 with Alitalia!!

DEL-SFO-DEL with Alitalia from Jan 2nd to Mar 18th. Search done using Momondo.com

As you can see from above that although the flight from "DEL-SFO" is 2 stops and little longer you are getting a free one-way for future date ("SFO-DEL" in March) with just additional $15 compared to booking "DEL-SFO" one-way ticket.

So, the next time you plan to travel in peak times and are looking to purchase paid ticket do remember the above two tricks before you make your purchase.

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