How to pick the (phony) return destination for a roundtrip ticket intended as a one-way?

Upvote:0

Whether an open jaw counts as a return trip, the rules are really arcane and not well known but a good rule of thumb can be: the segment of your trip that you don't fly (say, Bangkok-Hong Kong) must be shorter than the shortest leg of the trip that you do fly. If you have a HKG-YYZ direct that gives you an awfully large selection of airports even if you add that you must be in the same zone but zones differ wildly between airlines and/or alliances. In general, you can expect that China will be in the same zone as Hong Kong and very likely Japan too and not much else that would help here.

Also it's likely that a well chosen date can save you even more than messing with cities. ITA Matrix will help in both.

Upvote:2

The term of the art is hidden city ticketing: you book a flight from A to C, with a connection at B (the "hidden city"), and get off there.

In general, you'd look for flights from A to a major city C near B, so that there's as much competition as possible between A and C. For example, San Diego to LA costs a lot because it's a direct flight, but San Diego to Las Vegas is cheap because everybody flies to Vegas, so you'd look for SAN-LAX-LAS.

In your specific case, I'd try New York. Everybody offers flights from Hong Kong to New York, and Air Canada flies HKG-YYZ-JFK, so this seems like prime hunting grounds.

There's a few sites that claim to automate this process for you, eg. Skiplagged and FlyShortcut. Unsurprisingly the airlines really don't like these and are doing their best to sue them out of existence.

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