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Comment by georgieporgie | Hacker News Reader

Book your itinerary as a set of two one-way flights, rather than as a round trip.

Every time I have looked, a single one-way is more expensive than a round-trip between the same locations. Maybe I've just been 'lucky'.

Edit: no, I'm just ignorant. Turns out domestic one-ways are more proportionally priced versus round-trips.

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If your name is even remotely "exotic" (and mine seems to be), good luck checking in online - apparently one way tickets trigger some alarm in the depths of DHS.

That is true. And that basically tells us how stupid and ridiculous our security theater is. Someone planning to blow themselves up will supposedly save a couple of hundreds dollars in order to attract attention to themselves by buying a one-way ticket.

I suppose their assumption is that people planning to do that don't know this/are dumb.

Is it the alien or the fluid that's more exotic? Or are we talking Mohammed or Ahmed?

Lol .. I haven't tried traveling with Alien Fluid yet, but will let you know how that goes ;). It's Ahmed that gets me caught up every time.

this is usually the case especially for international flights. You always end up trading flexibility for price.

But it's usually not the case for domestic US flights, which is what the article is about.

I just checked and you're right. One-way's were just about exactly 1/2 the price of a round trip. Shows how much domestic flying I do.

My sense is that this has improved a lot recently, perhaps as a side-effect of trying to stay competitive in the travel-planning portals that can stitch together itineraries from multiple carriers.

To wit: when switching in Kayak or Hipmunk from roundtrip to one-way and vice versa, the fares roughly or exactly match what you'd expect from decomposing/recomposing the parts.

This was hardly ever the case in the past when using the airlines own portals, or Web 1.0 aggregators.

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