This may happen once in a while due to some algorithm weirdness, but it is absolutely not "often" the case.

> This may happen once in a while due to some algorithm weirdness, but it is absolutely not "often" the case

It's completely predictable, in fact I checked this claim at Google Flights before posting.

Say you want to fly from LON to NYC, next week, on OneWorld airlines, nonstop. Check the price for a one-way, then check the price when you add a return six months out.

No. It depends on the market, but if it is what's known as a "round-trip" market (typically international itineraries), it shifts to become "often" the case.

Airlines are all about price discrimination. Leisure travellers benefit inordinately from this behavior.

> Leisure travellers benefit inordinately from this behavior.

Is that necessarily true? Charging business travelers more means those businesses have to get the money from somewhere, and one way to do that is to pass the cost onto their customers. So even if you don't fly, you're now paying $0.001 on your next box of cereal to subsidize leisure travelers. Or maybe not! I don't have any data.

It is approximately always the case for international flights.

I challenge you to find a roundtrip ticket from anywhere to anywhere that is cheaper than the one way.

Here you go: https://twitter.com/bfontn/status/1456536089963995148

Happens all the time on Air Canada and Air France between Toronto and Paris.

Round-trip: $800

One-way: $2000 (or $4k for two one-ways to make up a round-trip)

I don’t know why anyone would ever book a one-way. It’s insanity.

It’s a real pain, and makes it harder to create your own open-jaw when the airline doesn’t serve all 3 cities.

What ends up happening is I book through other airlines entirely that don’t pull these shenanigans.

I posted this down thread: E.g. LAX-NRT on 3/2 on UA 32 is $966 right now. Add a return flight on 3/9 and the flight _drops_ to $893.

Airlines really hate accounting for one way passenger flow.

This is actually an interesting problem in the crypto space as well with things like remittances.

This is true for domestic flights, but international round trip tends to be cheaper

As part of her bachelor degree my SO spent 3 months in one of the west-African countries. On the way back, they wanted to meet up in South-Africa with some other students who had gone to a different country for a vacation before returning home.

Since she hates stuff like this, I was tasked with finding a cheap tickets. For the first trip from here in Norway to the west-African country, I found that the cheapest tickets were from KLM (who flew direct from Amsterdam, so only one stop), and the round-trip ticket was indeed about $300 cheaper than a one-way ticket.