flight advice

No fly open jaw which means you do as you asked US to London and home from Edinburgh to US all on one ticket with the same airline. Best and very much cheaper than two one way tickets.

When you go online look for the term “multi-city”. Open jaw is a term frequent travelers use but not the booking engines.

THANK YOU very much!

And the airlines themselves offer "multi city" flights. Sometimes it will cost a little more than a round trip, but the total cost will be less because you don't have to backtrack to the city where you first arrived. That saves time too, which is worth money on a trip.

Using sites providing multiple airline options in your ticket search - Google Flights, Skyscanner or Kayak - allows you to enter multi-city routing from your home airport to your final destination. Have correct airport code for exact airport you want to reach & get comfortable with 24-hour clock (any time in the PM, add 12, 14:45 is 2:45PM). I limit stops for connecting flight to 1, regardless if paying more $$ for tix. Want minimum 2.5 hours for my layover - ample for many airports & barely enough for others. And then there are circumstances that happen which are out of your control and no amount of time works, see Mt Etna eruption & Catania's airport closure just this week. I like to depart early evening on outbound flight as helps in my attempt for (at least some) onboard sleeping and avoid 0:dark 30 homeward bound flights. Tho, do want morning departure for U.S. bound flt, trying to avoid scheduling delays that build as time ticks by. I purchase direct from airline, sign up for email alerts for schedule changes, have their app on my phone with ticket/itinerary stored along with contact info for making changes needed on the fly. If I can swing at least Premium Economy I do and carry on 'hand luggage' on the way to Europe and will check baggage on my return. I'm an aisle person, liking ease of getting out of my row + having seat mate on only one side of me. I'll check airport website for all info needed for my transiting thru & to get a familiar with layout, noting arrival and departure terminals for my flights. I'll check airline website for cabin experience info, incl food/beverage/entertainment options during. I prefer flights operating multi-aisle jet vs single-aisle, with interior seating that has 2-seat row, or the 2-4-2 layout (not uncommon on Airbus, less so for Boeing craft). I have both hard copy and digital boarding passes on me for my journey. London is THE BEST and I look forward to my first trip to Edinburgh. Happy travels.

No matter which flights you book, be prepared for flight changes, or time changes, or both. You can also expect aircraft to change, so possibly different a seat configuration and different seats if you paid for a specific seat. It happens all the time in today’s ever changing environment.

My British Airways flight to Germany was recently cancelled 6 hours before departure. Its customer service was very efficient and got me booked on an IcelandAir flight leaving about the same time. It wasn’t premium economy like I had paid for, but I actually arrived earlier. Now I just need to submit a claim to get a refund for the extra paid for premium economy. My seat selection cost has already been reimbursed. For my return to the states, the aircraft configuration has already changed twice.

I always use Google Flights for checking on flights. They have lots of information on options as well as several parameters you can use to explore how your itinerary might look.

Multi-city is a common one for me. As an example, my flights last summer were very simple, but were multi-city. Seattle to London Heathrow nonstop then on to Dublin and London Heathrow back to Seattle nonstop. If I'd started in Tucson and returned to Seattle or vice-versa, it would've been a bit more complicated.

Depending on where you're flying from and back to, your multi-city flights might or might not be simple. Be aware that the cheapest flights may not always be the best due to things like added luggage costs, extra stops, etc.

I try searching for nonstops for each leg of the journey if looking for one stop produces too short of a connection time. Sometimes the one stop options come up with alternatives with decent connection times and sometimes they don't. For last summer's SEA to DUB via LHR I checked to be sure that I was seeing all the alternatives.

When you find an itinerary that suits your needs, you can set up to be notified as prices change for that itinerary. It's also useful to see the price history over time and how it's trending.

You can click through to the airline of your choice from Google Flights to buy your tickets or go directly to that airline and do a multi-city search there.

It may be a bit of a learning curve, but take the advice others are providing about the nitty gritty details and I'm sure you'll learn quickly.

Have a great time in the UK.

We are big fans of multi-cities, open jaw, tickets and most of our trips are open jaw. We rarely find them more expensive. However, you need to check all options. We recently found that two, one-way tickets were cheaper than any other combination. Cannot explain it but a one-way ticket on one airline and a return on another airline was cheaper. So, just need to run all options. Nobody, not even AI, understand the US airlines pricing practices.

Whilst this seems like a simple matter of buying a single multi city ticket, it's not as easy as that - there are very limited options for flying from Edinburgh to the USA.

Not sure why you think these will be expensive singles - that's not how it works. The huge amount of tax is the defining factor and that applies more in one direction than the other. The only time you really get a financial benefit (or rather, don't get a penalty is booking two flights with a layover, as for some of the tax elements that's one journey.

It's very likely you will end up having to book EDI to somewhere in the US that suits you that goes via LHR, or AMS or CDG or somewhere else