Elsewhere I had read this conundrum is based in simple supply and demand. That is, one-way tickets are so rarely bought compared to round-trip that they end up being more expensive.

My solution: Schedule the "return" flight at a time when you may actually wish to return, or as far into the future as possible. If you don't make it, oh well, you aren't out anything.

I stumbled across this because I found a super-cheap "repositioning" cruise to Genoa from Fort Lauderdale.

Be careful: if you buy a round-trip ticket or multi-leg ticket and miss any leg besides the very last leg, then the airlines will generally cancel the rest of your ticket.

Don't get me started on the price of air travel. It's cheaper for me to fly to Vietnam (one of my field sites) than to the remote community up North (field site #2) that's in the same country as I am. I know, bush planes are more expensive than commercial flights, but come on.

I was a travel agent for a while and we had all kinds of fun ways to take revenge on the airlines (which were in the process of cutting point-to-point ticket commissions to zero and sucked anyway.)

Like, say you needed a Saturday night stay (not, say, leave Monday and return Wednesday) to get anything but an obnoxious fare. Very common--The airlines used to require Saturday night stays for lower fares mostly because they figured short trips were business trips and were necessary enough to a company that the company would shell out big $$. Buy two round trips, one leaving the date you want to leave and returning way in the future, one returning home from (originating from) the city you're visiting and going BACK to that city in the future. Use ONLY the first leg of each round-trip. You might pay $400 -$500 total instead of $1200.

Also, say points east to California is in one of those WAY expensive periods. But a round-trip to a connecting city (and back) is on sale, as is a round-trip from that connecting city to California (and back.) Buy two round-trips that connect and pay $300 or $400 total (back in the day) instead of $1000 or $1200.

Want a one-way ticket? We ALWAYS sold a round-trip and told the customer to toss the second half.

Sometimes even a round-trip from, say, Cleveland to St Louis would be more expensive than a fare on sale from Cleveland connecting in St Louis to a point beyond, then the same thing back. So we'd send a passenger to the point beyond St Louis but s/he'd only use the CLE - STL / STL - CLE halves of the tickets. The catch: Carry-on luggage only (or your luggage will travel further than you!) And don't tell the airline personnel you're not going all the way to [wherever], or they WILL bust you.
;-)

FUN stuff! About the only fun part of the job.

Here's a classic that was circulated amongst travel agents. Makes brilliant sense if you're familiar with fare structures, and it points out how unfare (sic/heh) all is and how it takes advantage.

Some hotels have a similar system--no fixed price, but the price of a room on a date goes up as demand for rooms on that date goes up, with a computer calculating it all and the price fluctuating.

It all sucks, I tellya! The whole human world, or business world, if there's any difference.

Buying the round trip fare and only using the first part of it WILL get you questioned if you do it more than one time in 12 to 24 months in the U.S.A. It was a good plan in the 90's but now it can get you into long deep questioning by a dour bunch of humorless turds.

I was 3 when that article was published. I was tipped off by the part where he was talking about how strong the dollar was.

When I saw the reference to Eastern Airlines I checked the date of the article. I'm old enough that I remember flying Eastern, Pan Am, Braniff, Piedmont, TWA (gone fairly recently) and a few others.

Yeah, it's an old article, but the basics remain. What started me on this was when I found the cheapest one-way fare from one city was $3600 while the round-trip fares were starting at $650.

Now our plan is to use the returning flight to Europe to put us on another repositioning cruise back to the US. Then again, Travelocity gives the max time as 330 days between flights, so that plan is tentative.

Oh, it's still a good article. I just had a double-take moment when I read that bit about the dollar. *sheds a tear for the economy*