Change Penalty only After Ticketing
If the change occurs before a ticket is issued, the airline will not charge a penalty, although the travel agent working for you may ask for a service fee. If the change occurs after a ticket is issued, a change penalty as specified in the fare rules of the original ticket applies, if you are responsible for the change. If the airline is responsible for the need to rebook a flight, obviously no change penalty will apply.

Different Rules for Different Changes
There are different types of changes of a flight reservation and ticket. Important is the time of the change. There may be a change

• before departure
• after departure
• after no show

The scope of the change is also important. There may be a change of the

• flight date
• flight route

Change Before Departure
If you change your flight before the departure date, a new ticket will be issued according to prices and rules in place at the day of the change. All conditions for the new fares must be met, including advance purchase requirements, ticketing time limits etc. You will pay the price difference between the old fare and the new fare plus the change penalty specified in the old fare. If there are restrictions in the old fare rules regarding a refund in case of cancel, the nonrefundable amount of the original fare remains nonrefundable. The last flight of the new ticket must be completed within the maximum stay specified in the rules of the original ticket.
The change before departure is pretty complicated. For this reason carry many special airfares a rule saying “change before departure not allowed.” In this case the original ticket must be canceled completely, the fare minus the cancel penalty will be refunded and a new ticket will be purchased.

Change After Departure
If you rebook a flight after using a part of the ticket, the fare rules in place when the original ticket was issued will be used. If you do not change the routing and find space allowed with the original fare for your new flight, you pay only the change penalty and a possible service fee charged by the travel agency or airline help desk for their work with handling the change. If you need to use a more expensive fare for the return flight, or if you want to change the route of the return flight, and the new combination is allowed according to the original fare rules, you will pay the price difference between the original return flight and the new return flight plus the change fee. The fare for the already used part of the ticket will not be changed.

Change After No Show
If you did not show up for a flight on time, or if you could not use the flight because of reasons within your own responsibility, and you did not cancel the reservation before the plane started, a no show happened. Many airlines refuse to honor or refund a ticket after a no show. So, if you are stuck in a traffic jam on your way to the airport and you see that you cannot reach the plane, it is important to call the airline and/or your travel agent at least to cancel the reservation to avoid a no show.

Change Procedure
If there is a need to change a flight, two steps need to be done:

1. the reservation needs to be changed
2. the ticket needs to be changed

Sometimes you will not realize that two steps are done, because the travel agent or customer support representative reissues the ticket immediately after the change of the reservation. Many airlines demand in the fare rules that the ticket must be changed immediately after the flight is rebooked.
If you rebook a flight directly through the airline website, the ticket will be changed automatically.

Delayed Change of Ticket
Some airlines allow to change a reservation without immediately changing the ticket. This can be useful if you know that you cannot use the return flight as booked, but you are not yet sure which flight you will be able to use. Your travel agent could enter a return flight and wait with the change of the ticket until you are sure. But, again, this is not possible with all airlines and all airfares, and there may be a short time limit for adapting the ticket to the new schedule after you rebook a flight.

Single Open Jaw
A simple example for a single open jaw would be a combination of flight from Frankfurt to Los Angeles with a return flight from San Diego to Frankfurt. It makes good sense to combine these air flights in one ticket. Otherwise you would have to travel on the road or railroad from San Diego to Los Angeles to get your return flight to Frankfurt, or you would have to buy two separate one way tickets.
Another variant of an open jaw flight would be an arrangement where you travel from Frankfurt to Los Angeles, and return from Los Angeles to Munich.

Double Open Jaw
This would be a combination of a flight from Hamburg to Los Angeles and a return flight from San Diego to Munich. You could buy two one way tickets, but you can save a bundle if you manage to combine these two flights into one ticket as an double open jaw flight.

How to Book an Open Jaw Flight?
Many flight booking engines have a link you can use to search for an open jaw flight, or a multi stop flight. If you click on such a button, you get a new input form, where you can ask for a flight from A to B plus from C to D, maybe even afterwards from E to F. You enter your travel plans, and with good luck, you get a reasonable offer. Reasonable is the half price of a return ticket from A to B, plus the half price of a return flight from C to D. If you find an airline is flying both routes, and B is in the same country as C, while A is in the same country as D, you should be able to get a ticket for this flight. But if you do not get a reasonable for this flight on a booking engine, you still have the chance to call your travel agent and ask him to look. The rules about open jaw flights are included in the rules text of the airfare.

Ask Your Travel Agent
Booking engines often sometimes unable to understand all fare rules, and if the engine does not understand the rule, it does not offer the fare. But a human travel agent should understand the rules text and thus be able to price an open jaw flight, even if each air segment of the journey is flown with another airline. This is often possible, if all airlines concerned belong to a single airline alliance.
Sometimes you get a reasonable offer in the fare listing of the booking engine, but when you press the purchase button, you get an error message with a new expensive price. In this case ask again your travel agent for a price quote. Chances are a travel agent can sell you the ticket for the lower price. If the booking engine cannot find it, the open jaw flight may still be available.

Not to Ask Means Not to Get It
An open Jaw flight may even be possible, if the airports concerned are located in different countries. One example would be a flight from Germany to Kilimanjaro, with a return flight from Mombasa to Germany. Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania, Mombasa in Kenya. But in this example you can still combine these flights in a single ticket. There are offers from KLM, Ethiopian Airways and Condor of Germany.

Same Plane, Different Prices
But in one aspect, there is no change: In the same plane, especially in economy class, there are on each flights passengers who paid for their ticket twice as much as the passenger with the cheapest flight ticket. So one and the same flight can be an expensive flight, and at the same time a cheap flight. The question is now: We just want to leave the expensive part of the plane to somebody else! What do we need to do so that these flights are for us cheap flights?

Time is the Key to Inexpensive Airfares
The main keyword to get the a cheap airfare is “time”. It is the time, when you make your flight reservation, the time when you buy your ticket, and the time, when you fly. If you buy your ticket too early, you may miss some specials. Airlines bring their specials into the market, when they have an idea of the market conditions. For example, now. September 2009, airlines publish their specials for the coming winter, the travel season after Christmas. It would have been a mistake to buy a ticket for a flight coming February already this May. This is especially true if you travel in low season months. On the other hand it is much easier to get cheap flights for February or November, than for August or December.
On the other hand, If you know you need to travel from December 22 to January 5, it is better to get a reservation as early as possible. This means in late January of beginning of February. For a cheap air ticket in the summer vacations you may start to look in November. But if possible, keep your reservation open, and do not buy a ticket until January. In January, after the end of the Christmas travel season, specials for the summer vacations are usually published.

Minimum Stay and Maximum Stay Important for Ticket Prices
The other important time feature of cheap flights is a stay over a weekend in your destination country, and the maximum time your ticket is valid.

Ethnic Fares
Air France and KLM demand for their Visit Friends and Family offers even a minimum stay of 2 weeks. Other airlines have similiar programs. Since it is in Europe problematic to use the nationality of passengers to decide who can get these fares, other features are used to define this market segment. The fares of theses programs are sometimes only slightly lower than normal fares, but sometimes there may be stark price difference. And, what is equally important, the fare rules are more relaxed. Generally, cheap air tickets are not refundable, and often no change of the ticket is possible in any way. Ethnic fares target families who have roots in two or more countries, especially in Europe and in Africa, Asia or Latin America.
Ethnic fares and their cousins, like fares for military service people, are not offered in booking engines.

Cheap is not Enough
This brings another consideration on the table: We are not really looking for cheap flights. We want flights with well maintained planes, with an airline which will be still around when we want to travel home again, on a way as direct as possible, and that for a low price.

Add Hidden Cost into the Picture
You need to add to the ticket price some hidden cost, which are often forgotten. We have developed Maximum Value for Your Airfare to help you find and evaluate these less than obvious expenses. It includes a checklist, asking the right questions, and while you fill your answers in, it does the math for you. This way it is a real timesaver in itself.