One-Way Vs. Roundtrip Flights: Which Should You Book?

If you are travelling internationally, it can be complicated to travel into a country on a one-way ticket, depending upon your passport and the destination. I don’t know whether they would treat two one-way reservations as tantamount to a return ticket.

I also recall that many travel insurance policies exclude cover for trips involving a one-way flight - you need a return reservation to be covered. Again, whether two one-way tickets, returning to the point of origin would satisfy them is unclear.

Another advantage can potentially be the 75,000 maximum mileage accrual on expensive tickets - assuming OW cost = RT

Not optimistic at all 🙂 Both are actually incorrect. Booking one ways has no impact on either of these things. I do international one ways all the time. Most of the time immigration never ask about the return flight, only about date you're leaving. I've had one, maybe two, instances ever where I've had to show the ticket leaving the country. Travel insurance in my experience definitely does not have exclusions for one way flights if you are returning to your origin.

I'll give an extreme example that I'm going through right now. I need to fly back from Japan to NY later this year. I have an excellent F award ticket to get there (one-way ticket), and I had a separate award ticket for the return but my date has changed. There is zero award space on the new return date, so I've been looking at standard fares. A one-way premium economy on JAL or ANA is over $7k, J as high as $12k. Meanwhile if I book it as a round trip, those drop to about $2.5k and $5-6k, respectively. Unless some award space miraculously opens, I'm likely skip lagging this one.

@Khatl thanks for the info!

Wanted to go MSY to WAW Poland. Each of the legacy carriers wanted to bounce me around the north east and Europe (Paris, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt) before landing in Warsaw.
Resolution was to buy two separate set of tickets. DL to and from JFK; Lot Polish to and from JFK to Warsaw. Cheaper than the legacy carriers with all the connections, even with upgrades.
Go figure!!

Yes, I see the same thing when booking OneWorld single vs return tickets. Return tickets e.g. LHR-LAX are 1/3 the price of just the single ticket over the Atlantic westward. Weird.

So wait which leg exactly are u skipping?

@Maxell: I'm not skipping a leg, I'm considering going west round-the-world LHR-LAX-NAR-SIN-LHR....all on single tickets with different airlines to meet the flight times I like (I don't want to leave at 11pm from NAR for example...) I was just surprised that a single ticket LHR-LAX was so much more than buying a return back to LHR. SIN actually charge a more reasonable approx. 20% uplift on the single vs the double on various routes. OneWorld are where I really see the stark differences in price of up to 300%.

What about award flights. Which airlines are round trip always priced as two one ways?

It seems like AA might no longer always be doing so.

@Khati - There is no one size fits all answer to this question. Different countries have different requirements, sometimes depending on the visa type or nationality as well.

For example, Qatar requires citizens of Iran, India, Thailand and Pakistan who are obtaining visa on arrival to be booked on return tickets - a single ticket covering the legs to/from Qatar with the same origin and destination country. Two one-way tickets or an onward ticket are not acceptable. If you wish to travel on that kind of itinerary, you must obtain an eVisa or entry permit online in advance.

This is the point - it CAN be complicated. A lot of people who travel on EU/US/Canadian/Swiss etc passports often don’t appreciate that it’s not as easy or effortless for holders of many other countries’ passports. And I’ve recently read the fine print of a number of travel insurance policies that explicitly exclude cover for a trip unless a return ticket has been purchased. This is particularly so for travel insurance embedded with credit cards.

For paid roundtrip tickets, one potential advantage of having to change the return only (not outbound) is historical pricing: if you change the return at the last minute on two one ways, you'll pay a huge fare difference for not being within any booking window but on a round trip, you can just take the historical price that was in effect when you booked even if you have to change booking class.

I've had one way tickets into Paris and no one asked a question. Exited France via Chunnel, not one question.
Had to make emergency one way exit from London to US at last minute. Only got a supplemental notice on my boarding pass where they ran a drug swab on my carry on.
Exited London on another occasion with one way ticket. Only issue was Virgin Atlantic required verification of passport before issuing all boarding passes for connection in NYC.

Great article. I have racked up lots of extra AA miles and loyalty points over the years, and flown business class far less expensively, by finding a one-way mileage ticket to Europe (say, the excellent 34500 Avios one way business class deal on Iberia from Chicago to Madrid), and then buying a round-trip business class ticket from Europe-Chicago and then back from Chicago to Europe *months in the future*, when I will be on an entirely different trip. For example, I've found RT business class fares as low as $1800 from Stockholm to Chicago and they are on Finnair, which also means lots of extra AA LPs per $ spent, as AA still credits Finnair flights based on distance and cabin. And a terrific lounge in Helsinki, which is a very convenient city for a layover. If one goes to Europe a couple of times a year or more and can plan trips a little bit in advance, you can definitely use this strategy, which relies on getting a one way ticket to Europe to get things started and maybe one on the back end to come home, to halve your cost of flying in business class.

its noticeable too when paying tax on points redemption. Using AS points for BA, tax may be $1000 going to LHR and only $400 on the return. IF you book roundtrip they charge $2000 in taxes. Two one ways would be $1400!

The potential issue with this scenario is that if the initial flight is delayed or cancelled and the result is a missed connection the customer will be on their own regarding the second half of the itinerary as the first carrier will have no responsibility for it. Whereas with a through ticket the carrier causing the disruption is required per IATA resolution to arrange alternate transportation of the customer to their final destination.

That being said, the itinerary as described could likely only have been purchased on one ticket through a full-service travel agency.

Related to what you ask, is that the taxes may differ if booking a return or two one ways... and sometimes significantly (including in favor of two one ways). So a good idea when doing reward bookings to check both the mileage and the taxes on a return vs two one ways

Buying one-way tickets can cause a very different problem -- being flagged for extra security checks!

I was more worried at out getting to JFK and had built in a plan “B” should DL have dropped the ball. As for spending an extra day in NYC or Warsaw should there be an issue with Lot Polish, I was very flexible.

On a recent trip to NYC, I was worried JetBlue would drop the ball as they have as of lately. Booked the earlier depart to LGA. B6 had a subsequent departure to JFK 2 hours later. As you can guess, plan “B” worked. Won’t use B6 any more once I cash in all my points.

Domestic one way tickets have the advantages noted in the article. And the pricing looks the same as a roundtrip.

Same for international award tickets.

But I find that oneway international - in business - US=>EU are super expensive. I usually find that one way paid ticket costs the same as a roundtrip ticket. Am I doing something wrong? (Airlines I've tried = United, Swiss, Lufthansa, Air France etc.)

I think he's skipping the return back to the origin of his roundtrip ticket. Not sure that's skiplagging; it's more of a throw-away the return trip. Buy the roundtrip ticket for much less than the one way and then throw-away the return.

One point not mentioned is what if the return flight is cancelled.
On a round trip itinerary the airline is obligated to take you back home. It may cost them a lot, but they can't leave you stranded.
But with two one way tickets, the airline can just refund the return fare and let you deal with it. Your may have to pay much more for an alternative.

IANAL, read the contract and don't rely on my word.

I was in the same situation as you two weeks ago. I was on vacation in Japan and at the last minute decided to extend my trip. I cancelled my return J flight on JAL to SFO and of course was not able to find another award seat. I was only able to find a PE flight using AA miles LAX-SFO on JAL & AA.
I was then able to find a J flight on EVA air from Osaka -TPE- SFO for $2,490 and I chose that instead. The Tokyo-SFO flights were more than double that cost for a one way flight. So I would recommend checking flights out of Osaka if you haven't already done so.

I've done something like this too: I booked a RT flight to a major city in Europe on points and then booked separate tickets to my actual destination.
Saved a lot of money this way, or I thought, until on the day of my flight, the flight to Europe got delayed 5 hours causing me to miss my other flight I had booked. Even though it was on the same airline, because the flights were on different reservations I had to pay the cost difference on the last minute flight that as 4X higher than the cost of the original flight. My $150 flight became a $600 flight!

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned that when booking round trip, you often need to reprice the whole ticket if you want to change the return before departing the first leg. I just had this happened today where I needed to change a return flight (which was cost neutral) but United (via my company’s travel agency) requires me to reprice the full ticket and the outbound was $600 more expensive than when I booked it. Never booking round trip again.

UA won’t redeposit the miles when you cancel return on a round trip booking. Unlike AA you get flight credit for that passenger and not where the miles were originally deducted. Always book one way award ticket for domestic trips as redeposit fees have been eliminated and increased flexibility between airlines

Possibly I missed this point if it was covered in the sub-comments, but one advantage of RT over OW tix is when there is an issue with the outbound flight and the arrival point has to be changed.
For example, let's say you were planning to fly to Hilo (HI) and the day of your outbound flight, a volcano was spewing ash around that airport so flights to Hilo were cancelled. If you were rescheduled on a flight to Honolulu instead, with a RT tix you almost certainly would have the option to change your return to Honolulu or leave it as Hilo. With two OW tix, the return flight would still show out of Hilo, and if you didn't want to return from Hilo, you'd have to cancel and rebook and hope the price in miles or dollars had not changed and that there was inventory.

Say P1 and P2 both have enough points for a RT ticket and will fly together. I prefer having both travelers together one way on the same reservation, makes everything so much easier

Lucky - I’ve been always booking tickets as two one ways for years now, but recently I’ve noticed some domestic AA tickets that are pricing couple hundred dollars cheaper as a round trip vs two one way tickets. Almost to the point where the round trip is only slightly more than the price of a one way ticket. Have you been seeing the same, or is AA just testing a particular route?