1. Better management of changes in travel plans of onward and return trips. Say, if the return date of travel changes, then you just need to change the ticket for return journey, and not for the entire journey.

2. Also there were no incentives in terms of discounts in booking round trip tickets.

But in the past few months, several Airlines have started to give significant discounts on the purchase of Round trip tickets. For example on a Go Air ticket from Mumbai to Delhi and back, you can save around Rs. 1500/-, if you book a round trip ticket vs. separate onward and return tickets.

See the example search below:

1) Onward Booking fare: Rs. 5376/-

2) Return booking fare: Rs. 4976/-

3) 2-way booking (discounted) fare: Rs. 8762/-

So for this travel you can save 1592/- if you book 2-way.

But is there a catch?

Not really, just that you need to read the terms & conditions carefully for such bookings. Typically, if you expect the travel dates to change, then it may be better to have separate bookings, as the cancellation/change charges will apply on the entire ticket.

But if you are sort of sure, of the travel plans, then it is worth while, to book it in a single ticket and save money.

Try it out by firing out some two way flight searches. And let us know, if its helpful:

This feature was there in our pipeline since long time, and demanded by quite a few users. Earlier, we used to show the flight routes for a default assumed date when the user did not specified the date, which was causing some confusion to our users.

Also from a user-interface point of view it is much more intuitive to  show a big calendar which contains either available-fare, or a link to check fare, when the date is not specified.

So, for flight searches, If you do not specify the date then we will show you the fare calendar. If you specify the date, then we simply show the flight details for that particular date.

More details on Calendar:

We show the calendar for 5 weeks starting from ‘today’. You can click on “Next Week” and “Prev Week” links to see the fares for other weeks. From this calendar you can easily find out the lowest fare in that 5 week period. We show “Check Now” link when there is no data for a cell. By clicking on that link, the flight routes for that particular date is displayed.

For example when you search for “Mumbai to Delhi flights” we will show the fare calendar, which looks as shown below. Since these two are popular airports, you will see that most of the calendar cells are filled up (with the help of searches made by other users earlier).

Mumbai to Delhi flight fare calendar

Another example is “Bangalore to Jammu flights“. In this case the calendar looks a bit sparse — not many searches done for this route perhaps. So, it can be used as date select calendar. Click on any cell, and you will see the flight routes for that particular date.

Bangalore to Jammu flight fare calendar

We think that this feature will be useful for you. Please try it out and let us know what you think.

For example if you search for “Goa to Kolkata flights on sunday“,  you will see the connecting flights which you can book in one single click.

Fig: Connecting flights with single booking