Re-route our trip?

I think you're attacking this logically. There is a point at which the additional cost of the ideal flight routing is just too much for many of us to justify, especially when multiple tickets must be purchased.

However, monitoring flight costs may bear fruit. My time frame was different from yours, but last year I flew into Nice (departing from Washington Dulles) on May 1 and back from London on September 18 for a sub-$550 fare. That wasn't much more than I'd have paid to fly into Paris and out of London or for a roundtrip to Paris. I think there's still time for something good to happen to fares between NYC and Nice--maybe next month when people tend to be occupied with things other than booking transatlantic flights.

Are you also checking fares for a reverse itinerary, into Nice and out of Paris?

I had considered that, but it would involve a lot of juggling with accommodations. I have already reserved our accommodations in the original order, and while there is a possibility that I could change the dates on everywhere else, our accommodation in Paris is not available during the latter part of our trip. I spent an embarrassingly long time finding a place that is beautiful, comfortable, well located, and in our price range so I really want to stick with that accommodation. I am also monitoring flight prices with Philadelphia as our stateside option, as we are located roughly between Philadelphia and New York.

I am surprised that the open jaw is so much more; in my considerable experience flying open jaw, it has almost always been the average of the two round trips. Of course if the same airline doesn't serve both routes or something like that, it might be an issue. If you must go round trip then I would plan to travel to your furthest point the afternoon of the day of arrival and finish your trip in the city you will fly home from. Nothing harshes mellow like racing back to home base the day before your flight home; you end the trip on a hurried, boring note. The first day is a jet lagged waste anyway, so take a budget airline to your furthest point or hop on a train and use that miserable day on travel.

We ran into exactly this situation this fall. A one-way internal Air France ticket was much less than adding the flight to our Delta itinerary as an open jaw. But, we flew in the night before and stayed at the airport Ibis Hotel. I wouldn't try a non-connected flight on the same morning unless you were on a very late trans-Atlantic flight, like the 7:30pm to JFK.

Except for you kind of lose a day training back to Paris to fly home -- yes the train ticket is only $100 x 4 . . but you need to go the day before, so you have one day less of vacation down south (plus once you get into Paris you have to find somewhere to stay, then get out to the airport the next day for another $55 for the taxi). So keep that in mind as well as the money (which as others have mentioned, the cost of the open-jaw ticket may go down).

I agree that you should not try booking a separate flight from Nice to Paris on the day of your departure for your trans-atlantic flight. It could work out fine -- but it could also result in your missing your transatlantic flight and having to buy four new transatlantic tickets on the spot, which would cost WAY more.

Another re-routing option is to consider moving Chamonix to the end and flying home from Geneva. The drive from Chamonix to Geneva is very easy and takes only a little over an hour. We recently had an open jaw trip, O'Hare to Geneva, rented a car and drove to Chamonix, had a couple nights there, then a week in Provence, then some time in the Dordogne, after which we drove to Chartres and returned the rental car. We then took a train to Paris and had a couple nights there before our return flight to Chicago. The airfare was $871 RT, booked 6 months in advance for a trip taken in September. We loved our itinerary.

@janettravels44: I was expecting it to be a bit more, because there are fewer flights out of Nice than Paris of course, and almost all of the trips back to the US stop in Paris anyway, but at current prices the difference is over $300 per ticket. This does not include the budget airlines, but I’m not willing to risk the headaches that can come from a transatlantic flight on a budget airline with two kids in tow. Fingers crossed that it goes down quite a bit for the open jaw.

@Bets: Your advice to go the night before is well taken. I wonder though, if they would be necessary if the morning flight is scheduled to land by about 10 AM and the next flight would not go out until after 4 PM? I would certainly never arrive six hours early at the airport even for a transatlantic flight, and that would leave about three hours of wiggle room. Not sure if that would be enough, something to think about. There are lots of risks with travel scheduling that I would have gladly taken, and did take, in my single days, but traveling with the whole family is a different story.

@Vickie: That’s not a bad idea, and something I will look into for sure. I suppose that we could return the car on the French side of the airport without any penalty. It would mean finding and paying for parking in Nice and having the car a couple extra days, but if the price differential on the plane tickets is significant enough, it could be worth it, and no hassle of potentially untimely trains.

Thanks all, for the good food for thought.

I’m even considering just chopping Nice off the end of our trip, dropping the car in Marseille after our five days in Provence, and flying elsewhere in Europe to spend the weekend before returning to the US. Open jaw flights returning from London, Amsterdam, and Rome are all hundreds of dollars cheaper than out of Nice at today’s prices.

I think the problem on open jaw here is that Nice is not a major airport and doesn't have direct flights to the US. When we open jaw it is Rome/Paris, or Paris/Amsterdam or Paris/Madrid or our last one was Moscow/Paris -- and those are major airports.

We were in France in May 2018, travelling from Paris to Nice and back to Paris by train at the end.

The train was a pleasant alternative to flying fro a trip of this length.

Delta has a direct flight Nice—JFK. I’ve taken it.

My few words of wisdom,

Nice and Marseille are out of my train commute distance from Paris. Going home, for me, would include a flight whether it was going toward home or to Paris first.

June/early July is often train strike season but there's no way to predict that right now (that I'm aware of). Even when the train strikes, there are still trains running - just fewer and everyone deals with the additional inconvenience. In my experience the RER to Orly isn't inconvenienced at all by train strikes but the RER going north to CDG can be. I was fortunate to fly out of Orly (through Iceland) during my June trip - my other train legs were scheduled around known train strikes dates. The only real affect was trying to get any customer service at the train station, around the time of the strikes, would have been futile.

I tested late-June tickets from JFK to France on matrix.itasoftware.com

The results were quite different than reported here. A round-trip compared to open-jaws came back at almost exactly the same price from the Air France-Delta partners. The range of difference was $40 maximum.

My suggestion to the original poster is to be sure to use a multi-destination search function. An open-jaws deal is not a pair of single tickets bought separately.

In this situation I would fly into southern France first, which may require changing planes in Paris or another international European gateway. Then fly back from Paris non-stop, alllowing a more comfortable time of departure than leaving Nice early in the morning for a change in Paris.

Yep, I know all about booking an open jaw flight, and that it’s not two one-way tickets. I have been using Kayak to look at prices. Your results are likely different because you are including the budget airlines, which I’m not willing to use, given the unreliability. Also, we need to arrive in NYC the same day we depart, which adds to the cost. Given my parameters I’m 100% sure my figures are accurate.

A direct flight from New York is not a direct flight for most people in the US. I have lived in several US major cities and none of them had direct flights to Nice. When we lived in Nashville, we often flew open jaw with a change in Chicago and could get open jaw trips for no more than the average of the RTs, but apparently the OP could not get good deals like that. Given what the OP is finding, I would fly RT Paris and then fly budget airline to Nice on the afternoon of arrival and end with a few days in Paris. The main issue there is luggage and needing to conform to whatever the budget airline requirements are; they are not onerous but they are specific.