HIDDEN CITY TICKETING? HOW DOES IT WORK?

Either you are occasional traveler or a regular traveler looking to travel on the high demand route, knowing hidden city ticketing could help you save $$ for your next trip or reduce the cost to some extent. So what does the "Hidden City Ticketing Mean"?
The idea of Hidden City ticketing is knowing the cheaper or "low fare" markets around the "high demand / high cost" market and using it to our advantage on saving the cost. Let's see few examples:
San Francisco (SFO) to Los Angeles (LAX) for close in Thursday Evening ticket (08/21)
A quick search on ITA Matrix gives the below results. As you can see the price is pretty much standard across the board to be $210 (whoops!!). I have purposefully shown details of one of the flight and soon you will see why?

---

SFO - LAX -- 08/21/2014

Now let's check out some of the so called "low demand" markets around LAX and see if that gives any better pricing. The way to do this is, enter "LAX" in advance routing code field as highlighted below and let's change the destination to San Diego (SAN). Check out the below screenshot for pricing..

SFO - SAN via LAX -- 08/21/2014

SFO - SAN via LAX -- 08/21/2014

As you can see from above, the direct flight from SFO to LAX on AA1143 was costing $210, but now the same flight is available for $152, if you decide to booked SFO - LAX - SAN route. There are few important things you should remember before you decide to fly SFO - LAX only for $152.

• Make sure you have NO CHECK IN bags, this is because you do not plan to take the flight from LAX-SAN and as such ideally the check-in bags are checked to final destination only.
• DO NOT use your primary frequent flyer number (i.e. AA), you could credit this to any of the other partners, as you do not want to get flagged (If you do this regularly and have your Frequent Flyer (FF) number in there you are inviting trouble). 

As you can see you saved almost 33% flying the same Airlines you wanted, but with the help of hidden city ticketing. The concept could be applied to other routes and destinations as well. Also if you fly "hub-to-hub" you might want to check the "non-hub" location for savings (as the routing would be always through hub! ).