Recurring roundtrip flights (every weekend)

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You are looking for a flight pass; various airlines offer these, sometimes directly but often in collaboration with a specialist vendor, Optiontown. That's the case for Air France, for whom the product is branded as 'Le Pass'. I'm more familiar with their product for BA, but they seem to work in broadly the same way. There are various parameters you can tune; the more flexible you want it to be, the more expensive it will work out on a per trip basis. In particular:

  • You specify how many flights you want up-front. The more you commit to, the greater the discount per flight (but clearly it's only a saving if you use almost all of them).
  • Those flights can be shared across a number of named passengers (so if occasionally a family member wants to travel with you, they can use some of 'your' quota; but the more people listed, the greater the price).
  • The cheapest passes will be for a single route, but you can also request larger geographic regions (generally more useful if you're trying to travel regularly for business across Europe than visiting family, but perhaps you have friends / relatives at another destination too and the combined pass would be worthwhile.)
  • Having the freedom to book truly last minute will be very expensive; you can save by agreeing to book (that is, exchange flight passes for actual tickets) by various cut-off points such as at least 30 days before departure. There's usually some fine print here as to exactly which flights you're allowed to exchange for - a cheaper pass might not have 'last seat' validity and instead require availability in a cheaper fare class.

Crucially, you don't have to book in all your flight dates at the time of purchase of the pass, you can book on a rolling basis as you firm up your plans, despite locking in the price earlier (the downside being you've also locked in a certain volume).

Unfortunately, it seems Le Pass cannot currently be purchased, presumably due to COVID concerns, so I can't compare the price to those you've found. But it looks like you should be in the cheapest possible case - one passenger, one route, weekend stay, dozens of trips - so it should be favourable especially if you can cope with booking significantly in advance.

Upvote:4

You should look into buying overlapping roundtrip tickets - you use the outbound leg this Fri, and the return leg Mon in a week (10 days later). For the returnthis Monday, you get a second ticket (reversed directions), and use it equally spread.
This is often substantially cheaper.

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