Fly Into Rome, Home from Paris: The Open-Jaw Itinerary Most Travelers Never Book

Here's an itinerary thousands of travelers book every week: fly into Rome, work north through Florence and Venice to Milan... and then take a four-hour train back to Rome to catch their return flight home.

That backtrack costs a vacation day, a train ticket, and usually a final mediocre airport-hotel night — all to satisfy an assumption that was never true: that flights must depart from the airport you arrived at.

The fix is called an open-jaw ticket: fly into one city, fly home from another, on a single booking. Into Rome, out of Milan. Into Tokyo, out of Osaka. Into Lisbon, out of Madrid. Airlines have sold these for decades — it's the "multi-city" button sitting right next to "round trip" on every booking site — and for itineraries that move in a line, it's strictly better. Usually for about the same price.

The short version:

• What it is: One ticket, arriving at city A and departing from city B. Booked with the "multi-city" option — two searches: home → A, then B → home.
• What it costs: On most major carriers, a round trip's price is roughly the sum of two half-round-trip fares — so an open jaw within the same region typically prices within $0–75 of a standard round trip.
• What it saves: The backtrack — typically a travel day, a train or domestic flight fare, and a throwaway hotel night. Commonly $150–300 and a full day per person.
• When to use it: Any linear route — Italy north-to-south, Japan's Golden Route, Iberia, Vietnam, two-island Hawaii, coastal road trips (rental car one-way fees can change this math — check them).
• Award tickets too: Most programs price awards as one-ways, which makes open jaws trivially easy with miles — book two one-way awards and the "open jaw" costs literally nothing extra.

---

Why open jaws don't cost more

The intuition that an open jaw must be expensive comes from the old days of airfare, when round trips were heavily discounted against one-ways and any deviation triggered penalty pricing. That world is mostly gone. Major U.S. and European carriers now price the vast majority of economy round trips as two one-way fares added together — which means the return leg doesn't care where it starts.

Home → Rome plus Milan → home prices as: half a Rome round trip, plus half a Milan round trip. If Rome and Milan fares from your city are similar — and within a region they usually are — the open jaw lands within a rounding error of the ordinary round trip.

A typical shape of the math, per person:

The airfare was $30 more. The trip was $175 cheaper and a day longer where it counts.

One booking note: use the multi-city search, not two separate one-way tickets, when you want it on one reservation — one ticket means the airline protects the whole itinerary and international one-ways on legacy carriers can price punitively when booked alone. (On carriers that price one-ways at half a round trip, two one-ways work fine too, and give you carrier flexibility — that's the subject of our one-way vs. round-trip guide.)

The route shapes where open jaws shine

Look for lines, not loops. Any trip where the natural path moves in one direction is an open-jaw trip:

• Italy: Rome → Florence → Venice → Milan. The classic. Trains do the middle; the open jaw does the ends.
• Japan's Golden Route: Tokyo → Hakone → Kyoto → Osaka. Fly into Haneda/Narita, home from Kansai. The Shinkansen middle is the trip; nobody should ride it backward on the last day.
• Iberia: Lisbon → Porto or Lisbon → Seville → Madrid. Iberia-region fares are similar across the gateways.
• Vietnam: Hanoi south to Ho Chi Minh City (or the reverse). The backtrack flight this kills is two-plus hours.
• Hawaii, two islands: Into Honolulu, home from Maui or Kona. Interisland hops replace the return-to-Oahu shuffle.
• Road trips: Into Denver, out of Las Vegas; into Calgary, out of Vancouver. One caveat here — one-way rental car drop fees vary from $0 to several hundred dollars by company and route, so price the car before the flights. Sometimes the drop fee eats the gain; often (within regions, especially with the major agencies' one-way specials) it doesn't.

The anti-pattern is the loop trip: if your route naturally circles back — a week based in Paris with day trips, a ski trip, a single-city stay — a plain round trip is simpler and there's nothing to save.

Open jaws with miles: even easier

If you're booking with points, this whole post gets simpler. Nearly every major program — including United MileagePlus, American AAdvantage, Delta SkyMiles, and Air Canada Aeroplan — prices award tickets as one-ways at half the round-trip rate. An award open jaw is just two one-way awards: home → Rome on one program, Milan → home on whichever program has space.

This is quietly one of the biggest practical advantages of award travel: mixing carriers and gateways costs nothing. Cash tickets reward symmetry; awards don't care. And per our backup-flight strategy, those one-way awards on the majors remain freely cancellable if plans shift.

How to actually book it

1. Sketch the land route first. Where does the trip naturally start and end? Those are your airports. Don't force the geography to match the flight — that's backward.
2. Search multi-city with leg one as home → start city and leg two as end city → home. Compare against the plain round trip into either end.
3. Sanity-check the gateways. If the fare jumps hundreds of dollars, one of your two cities is an expensive or poorly-served gateway — try the region's bigger airport (out of Florence vs. out of Milan can be a $300 swing).
4. Book the middle separately. Trains, budget flights, and rental cars covering the middle are almost always cheaper booked directly for the specific leg.
5. For awards: search two one-ways independently and book the best space in each direction, any carrier combination.

Ten extra minutes of searching, and the payoff is structural: the trip ends where it ends, and the last day of your vacation belongs to the vacation.

Byline Tip: Build the land route in Byline first — cities, nights, trains — and the itinerary makes the flight decision obvious: the first and last stops on your timeline are the airports to search. Add both flight legs and the middle segments, and the whole open jaw reads as one clean line from home back to home.