| If you travel regularly to a
particular destination, but don't stay over weekends, you can get the
cheaper weekend rates by staggering your tickets. I.e., if you're flying
from A to B and back Monday and Wednesday of Week 1, and the same Week 2,
instead of buying roundtrip tickets for each week, buy a roundtrip ticket
leaving A Monday of Week 1 and returning Wednesday of Week 2, and a second
roundtrip ticket leaving B Wednesday of Week 1 and returning to B Monday
of Week 2. |
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| This works out to be precisely the same flights, but since both
tickets are over a weekend, you get the cheaper rate. The only problem is
that you have to know your schedule in advance to make this work. Using
the Pittsburgh-San Francisco example from above, this method would save
you $1708 on a pair of midweek round trip flights.
The two round trip
flights consist of two outgoing flights (1, 3) and two returning flights
(2, 4). Normally these are grouped as on the left, with flight #1 from A
to B being paired with flight #2 from B to A, and similarly for flights #3
and #4. The result is two midweek flights, neither of which is over a
Saturday night. But we could also pair flight #1 with flight #4, and
flight #2 with flight #3, as shown on the right. Then the middle pair of
flights (#2 and #3) becomes a round trip with its origin at your
destination, and both sets of round trip tickets are over a Saturday
night.
The 30-day maximum stay on discount fares
prevents you from using this overlapping round trip tickets trick if you
travel to a destination infrequently (say, every six months). If your
trips are more than 30 days apart, here's a new trick to use. Buy two
round trip discount tickets (weekend stay) per trip, using one for the
outgoing trip and one for the return, and then turn in the return portion
of each ticket for credit towards your next trip. Even with the $25 or so
processing charge per ticket for crediting and reissuing the ticket, it is
still cheaper to do this than to buy a single round-trip ticket without a
weekend stay. |
