"Open Jaw" vs. round trip
 

I am finding that round trip from the US to Europe or Israel is the more economical way to go.
Can anyone recommend a travel agent to help with flights from US-Israel-Greece-US?

Thank you.

I am finding it is better to fly round trip from US to Israel and then again round trip from Israel to Greece. We are a large group of 6 so even little savings on flights add up.

<i>I am finding that round trip from the US to Europe or Israel is the more economical way to go.</i>

Factoring in the price of the return to the point of departure? In other words if you go US--Greece--Israel, how much will it cost to get back to Greece in order to fly back to the U.S.?

Have you tried www.kayak.com?

You would get a lot more advice if you gave which cities you are travelling between - not much use giving advice for New York if you live in San Diego

At a guess you should look at an American airline that flies US-Greece & US-Israel then look at a separate flight with a Greek or Israel based airline between Israel & Greece

"Factoring in the price of the return to the point of departure? In other words if you go US--Greece--Israel, how much will it cost to get back to Greece in order to fly back to the U.S.?"

To add to this, will you have to pay for meals and a hotel before your homeward flight? If yes, then an open jaw ticket will possibly make better sense.

Why would you need a travel agent to book a flight? It's so easily done on the telephone or internet. And yes, once you figure out how much it's going to cost you to get back to your arrival city, there's usually hardly any difference at all between open-jaw and RT.

When deciding -- you need to factor in all the related expenses/hassles -- NOT just the basic airfare.

The bottom line is just dollars, compare all those flights with US-Israel-Greece-US.

But what you are asking isn't really a typical open jaw (which is into one city and out another), you are booking another flight in the middle of it. So it's really 3 flights, not 2.

I checked and think what you are saying could be true, but only by a little, and may vary by dates and what flights you are willing to accept. I found RT flights to/from ATH or TLV from about $1300-1400 from my city. Then I found one-way flights to ATH from TLV for around 200 euro on Olympic Air. Didn't check others, and a RT TLV-ATH for around $400.

So doing what you suggest would be around $1800 total (the two RTs). However, the open-jaw into TLV and out of ATH was about $1725 (on a reasonable schedule), and the one-way from TLV to ATH was 200 euro or $300, so that is a total of about $2000.

So it would save around $200 a person when I checked -- and I only considered reasonable flights, not those with 15 hr layovers, when you could do it cheaper. But that doesn't consider your time and trouble flying back to TLV. If that costs you a day, you aren't winning IMO.

Thank you for you advice about the "open jaw" tickets. What strategy should I use in pricing airlines? Should I be checking KAYAK daily? How often do rates change? That is one thing I was hoping a travel agent would know. I have alerts on skyscanner. Anything else I should do?

Rates change all the time, but on any airline website you can sign up for alerts when they do change.

Rates change constatnly and no travel agent is going to watch that for you - unless you pay them some huge fee. They willlook at tickets at the time you come to them - they won;t foof around for weeks on something.

I think Kayak sends you price alerts, but they won't do them for open-jaw flights. That's why I've always found it kind of worthless, as I often do them. But sometimes I put up the RT for one part of it to get an idea of fare changes (ie, if I want to go to Prague and return home from Paris, all on Air France, I'll put in for a RT to Paris).

When I'm doing this, I check Kayak several times a week on my own. Because I know the filters I want in terms of travel time, number of layovers or airline, etc.). I don't know if you can have travel alerts on those local flights -- I think Olympic and El Al and Aegean air had one-way flights TLV-ATH.