Tips on how to reduce your costs of flying

So here is a way to reduce flight costs if you are a regular flyer - some companies charge extra if you spend less than 3 days or do not stay over the weekend (Air France and Luffy do). If you are a regular mid weekly flier like my wife (I do her booking), then if you buy two trips (four flights) but cross the tickets, this might save you about 100 yoyos per round ticket. Play around:

Leave: Round Trip 1 start
Return: Round Trip 2 start
Leave: Round Trip 2 return
Return: Round Trip 1 return

This works because she has short stay-overs.

So we are booking flights in & out of Paris for about 100€ round.

...so you're presumably paying €200 then, since you're buying two return flights in total.

I just had a quick look at the Lufthansa website for flights between Munich and Paris and found midweek flights returning the following day starting at €88, and it's certainly not my experience that Lufthansa charge extra for short midweek trips. I fail to see how booking two return flights can be cheaper than booking one.

If you do indeed go for this option, your second return flight must start in Paris. If you fail to show for the outbound flight, your return leg is likely to be cancelled.

Incidentally, here's another tip for reducing flight costs: single tickets, now offered by most the major airlines. Not by Lufthansa to Paris it seems, but certainly to London. For Christmas I'm flying out with Lufthansa for €49 and returning on Air Berlin.

@STB: I think ZM's point is that she would use both flights anyway but that flight 1 saves money because the departure and return are further apart. Thanks for the tip, ZM!

Ah, I see. It still seems unnecessarily complicated given the choice of low-price flights returning the following day. I don't see any evidence that the prices are higher because the trip is less than three days or doesn't include a Saturday night.

STB - Yes you can lower the cost by flying the next day but, we wanted to do the following: Out on Tues nights back on Friday nights, every week.

Saturday morning flights were our previous answer (70€ adds up week after week) but we also want to assure a full Saturday here with our daughters (Mrs. ZM does get some Friday nights off in Paris) so flying the next day is not really an option sometimes.

BTW, when I do her booking, I'm running the Luffy site, Kayak.com, airfrance.fr, and airberlin in different windows. Trust me on this, I have more than 70 self paid flights in the last 12 months, and cost counts. Now I book a month of flights in about 30 min.

As both flights are now separated by 5 days & weekend, they are both cheaper.

And if scheduling is a problem, that trip get moved up a couple week for small rescheduling cost of 50 yoyos. The thing not to do (I did it once) is to get your pencils mixed and book return on outgoing... but the gals at Terminal 1 are nice, and if you show a travel card they sometimes drop the second change fee.

Do you guys know about www.skyscanner.com ? A friend told me about it and I always use it now. The site finds you the cheapest flights it can so it saves you having to check all the other websites yourself.

My company do this a lot for me, the Lufthansa flights to Stockholm can be really expensive, and buying two return trip working the times out right, so you use the outbound of one and the return of the other, and the two flights were cheaper if I had taken a return trip in the same week on one flight.

But you have to look at this, its not the same for all flights or destinations.

leah- i haven't checked out your suggestion, but from what you said it sounds like skyscanner.com is similar to kayak.com

It should also be noted that some airlines will cancel one of your flight legs if you fail to check-in for the other leg.
This could leave you stranded and having to pay more to get to your destination. Don't you think the airlines already
know about people doing this kind of travel.

thanks for the tip zemonkey, from january I might have to go to London every week and it will save me hundreds.

mere - I hadn't heard of kayak.com before but I just took a look and it seems it's a similar thing. I don't know exactly how much you can do with kayak but skyscanner has features that I like.

e.g. If you are planning a trip somewhere and can be a bit flexible about when you go, you can just pick a month of the year and skyscanner will show you the cheapest days to travel on in that month. Or if you fancy just getting away for the weekend, you can pick the weekend and it will give you a list of the cheapest flights to various countries for your weekend break.

DK - no, you do both round trips (4 flights), but they are staggered, see post 3.
Speedy - welcome, glad to be of help.
Leah - Skyscannner and Kayak have pretty much the same features - one or the other will help you find the cheapest flight, my tip uses them with an fake extended stay as you are doing 4 or more flights.