Fare hack: risk of booking a same-day multi-city ticket vs. through one-way ticket
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 1 Aug, 2023
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I contacted Spirit and got this response:
…a multi-city booking is considered as flight booked separately and we cannot guarantee that our airport representative could assist you in making the connection in the case you are to miss it.
They also confirmed it will complicate things if you have checked baggage.
In that case, each flight will require its own baggage charge and the bag will have to be picked up at the intermediate destination and re-checked.
In practice there were no issues with taking the flight. I was able to get both boarding passes from the check-in agent at MSY. Self check-in didn’t work so they checked me in manually but didn’t charge for it. The flights were operated by the same plane as Aganju pointed out – I just had to get off and reboard. I had no checked bags and just a free “personal item” as carry-on, otherwise this probably isn’t worth it.
Considering that the two segments of the multi-city flight you show are on the same plane and flight number, a delay would with high probabilty just delay the second segment too. So although in general multi-city brings some risk, in your case, there is little difference to the direct booking.
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If you book with two different bookings, then the airline responsibility won’t be the same as if you had one single booking with multiple flights.
The maximum protection comes with one single booking. In that case, if you miss the connection, then the airline will have to find another flight for you. They accepted the contract with the two flights and the limited connection time so they have to make it happen. If for some reasons, they can’t, then they have to offer a solution to you.
If you have two separate bookings, it is your responsibility to show up in time and it will mostly be goodwill from the company to offer a solution with another flight if you miss the second one.
Companies perfectly knows the tricks to pay less for tickets. So in this situation, don’t expect too much goodwill from them. They will see that you had 2 different bookings…
Then, the delay circumstances might help you. If this was clearly an issue with the company like a damaged plane, they might be more helpful than if it was due to fog or something outside of their control. Same if you are loyal customer, it will help as well.
The special case of a multicity booking within the same booking session should result in one booking number. So you should be more protected than if you had two separate bookings but less than if the airline made the connection delay decision for you. With a multicity booking, you are bypassing the minimum delay required by the airline to make the connection so they can easily claim that they wouldn’t have allowed or backed this. Still you have one booking so they are more liable than if you had 2 bookings.
I would suggest to get this confirmed by the airline customer service as different airlines might have different policies in this situation.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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