What is the name for the set of the outbound segment and inbound segment together?

Upvote:5

You could call it a Round trip. As per the Cambridge dictionary:

a trip from one place to another and back to where you started

This is a related question asking the opposite.

Upvote:6

I do not believe there is an expression that corresponds to the collection of segments comprising exactly the inbound and outbound segments (and excluding other segments on the ticket, journey, or PNR), but either itinerary or journey is perhaps the closest match. There are problems with using these terms, see below.

itinerary

The part of the PNR describing the flight segments booked for the passengers named in the name field of the PNR.

or

journey

Travel between an airport/city where travel commences and an airport/city where travel ultimately terminates. A journey may be comprised of one or more segments.

From the IATA Passenger Glossary of Terms.

Itinerary is the more concrete term. We can see whether a flight is on the itinerary by checking the PNR. But if the ticket includes surface sectors (such as the gap in an open jaw), they do not appear on the PNR. Journey presumably includes the complete, er, journey, including the surface sectors.

The subtle problem with using "itinerary" is that "outbound" and "inbound" are fare construction notions. Specifically they apply for constructing round trips, open jaws, and circle trips (but not round-the-world trips). But our definition of "itinerary" is defined in terms of a PNR. ("journey" is even more vague.)

A PNR is minimally just a collection of flight segments and a passenger name. How those flights are partitioned into one or more valid fare components and one or more priced tickets is a separate matter.

For an example: suppose you have a round trip in preparation, and also decide to book an unrelated one-way trip a few weeks after you return. Instead of creating a fresh PNR, your travel agent appends another flight segment to your existing PNR. He might decide to price the whole itinerary as a single pricing unit as an origin open jaw, returning through the city of origin with a stopover there on the inbound component. Alternatively it might be priced as two pricing units: the sum of a round trip unit plus a oneway component. More exotically it could be priced as the sum of two one ways (with a stopover) or the sum of three one way components.

In any case, the new flight would be part of your itinerary and journey per the definitions above, by virtue of being on the same PNR, but whether it is part of the inbound part (and whether an inbound part exists at all) depends on how the itinerary is priced.

Upvote:23

At the airline I work at, we do not have a specific piece of internal jargon for this. As you note, we track legs, because they're what aircraft do; and we track segments, because they're what passengers do. Informally, we might talk of 'the booking' or 'the PNR' for the collection of segments, but I would suggest that itinerary is a better description.

A quick look through my email inbox confirms that itinerary is used by at least BA, Easyjet, Expedia, KLM and Ryanair in confirming such booking details (plus a variety of train and coach operators, and even a helicopter tour I once took...)

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