Hidden City

The hidden city method takes advantage of the airlines' habit of charging more to fly out of their hub cities than through them. If your destination is a city whose inbound and outbound flights are dominated by a single airline that charges more because of its monopoly, you can book yourself to (or from) a less expensive, less popular destination that connects through the more expensive city (the hidden city) and simply get off at that stop and not take the rest of the flight. This undermines the airlines' strategy of improving profitability by charging low rates for travel to low traffic destinations while charging higher rates to the hubs where the demand is higher.

A hidden city fare can be used when booking a flight from Los Angeles to Dallas/Ft.Worth. For example, the regular coach fare is $310. But, by booking the flight from L.A. to San Antonio via Dallas/Ft. Worth your fare is lowered to $100. That's a savings of $210. In addition (even though recent new rules prohibit "throwaway city" flights), because of stiff competition on international routes, many fares to or through foreign cities are actually less expensive than domestic flights. That's because domestic fares have been rising while international fares, on some routes, have dropped. For example, a cheap flight from Dallas to New York could be orchestrated by booking a flight to Toronto with a connection in New York. Fly from Dallas to New York, get off the flight and forget the portion to Toronto. This saves $260 off the unrestricted coach fare of $482 for a direct Dallas-New York flight. Round trip flights to foreign destinations with extra stops ticketed in cities not actually visited can save long distance travelers $1,000 or more.

Hidden city fares drive airlines crazy. They claim this practice violates their rules, and some agents won't book clients on a hidden cities itinerary. Sometimes an airline will cancel return reservations when a customer misses an outbound connection so always reconfirm your return reservation.

Nested travel

Nested travel (also sometimes called split-ticketing) is particularly useful when you want to fly as cheaply as possible, but don't want to stay over a Saturday night as required by most excursion fares. To avoid this trap you can buy two discount tickets, one round-trip ticket from your city to the destination, the other around trip ticket from the destination to your city.