An open-jaw ticket lets you fly into one city and return from a different one. For example: Tbilisi → Barcelona … Madrid → Tbilisi. This trick often means a similar or lower price than a standard round-trip, less backtracking and far more cities packed into a single journey.
Open-jaw vs standard round-trip
- Round-trip: Tbilisi ↔ Barcelona — you return to the same city
- Open-jaw: Tbilisi → Barcelona … Madrid → Tbilisi — two cities in one trip
- Open-jaw is often the same price as a round-trip or even cheaper
- Gap leg (Barcelona → Madrid) — by train 25-40€, fast and scenic
A real example
Barcelona + Madrid: a separate round-trip to each from TBS costs roughly $130 + $120 = $250. An open-jaw TBS→BCN + MAD→TBS costs about 340+280 = $230 (+ BCN-MAD train ~€25 ≈ $260). Slightly more, but you see two cities!
Another example: Wizz Air from Kutaisi — fly into Prague, fly home from Vienna.
Use the Multi-city search on Skyscanner or Google Flights to find open-jaw tickets across all airlines at once.
Where to buy open-jaw tickets
- Skyscanner — Multi-city search across all airlines
- Google Flights — simplified multi-city feature
- Kiwi.com — most flexible; builds auto-transfers too
- Travel365 — price comparison + price calendar
Split ticketing — an alternative hack
Split ticketing means buying a route as two separate tickets — e.g., TBS→IST + IST→BCN instead of a direct TBS→BCN. Can be 30-40% cheaper.
Warning: with separate tickets the airline is not responsible for a missed connection. See our article on layovers and transit for full details.
When open-jaw works best
Open-jaw is ideal for a European multi-country tour — enter one country and exit another without backtracking to the same hub. Top combos: Budapest → Vienna, Rome → Milan, Lisbon → Madrid.
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