Open Jaw Ticket Question

Most airline websites (as well as booking sites like Orbitz) have a multi city option on their reservation search site. Just use that one. Say 1st leg, Chicago to Paris, then 2nd leg, Munich to Chicago for instance.

When you are looking for tickets, there is a choice to say multi-city. If you use that feature and put in where you want to go to and leave from it will pull up options like if you did a round trip search.

Is it best to go right to the airlines website or use something like Kayak first?

Open-jaw or multi-city ticketing allows you to fly into one city and out of another, eliminating the time and expense of backtracking to your original arrival city.

I always prefer to deal with the airlines (I have a frequent flyer account with Delta). The best reason for booking with the airline directly is that if something goes awry, you must deal with the vendor that sold you the ticket. Also, the price differences for the routes that I want are not that different.

I always use Hipmunk or Kayak first, but ultimately I always go directly to the airline's web site to book.

I generally do the Multi-City search on Kayak or similar search engine, but once I've seen the pricing, I prefer to go to the airline directly. There have been instances where I have not used the airline, after searching on Kayak. I remember once I flew SAS, but the airline wanted more money than what Kayak was quoting (which was through http://www.vayama.com/), so I went to the Vayama website to get that lower price for the same SAS flight.

You can also do three or four leg trips. For example A to B, B to C, C to D. and home D to A. The savings can be substantial. We almost always find open jaw ticket to be cheaper or nearly the same (I view + - $50 as the same) over RT tickets.

Sorry, one more question. What if Kayak pulls up the flight into Milan through Emirates and the flight out of Munich with another airline. Will each airline honor a one way ticket or does the open jaw have to be on same airline?

If you are true to your user name (from NJ) and want to go to Milan and come back from Munich, look at coming back from Frankfurt instead. I see United/Lufthansa of $750 out of Newark. United/Lufthansa and American are in a bit of a fare war out of Frankfurt now. Both to Milan and back from Frankfurt are nonstops. Frankfurt airport is 3 1/2 hours from Munich on direct ICE trains for as little as 47 EUR ($53), when you buy a nonrefundable ticket. So that saves about $300.