Going down UA coming home JB-any problems with this?

[lindanj]

Hi....I am able to get a good price/time flight going from NJ on United Airlines and a good price/time coming home on JB. I'm kind of nervous booking 2 one way flights on different airlines, only because I have never done this before. Do you see any problems with this? Are there any advantages to booking a round trip instead? It is definitely more expensive booking a round trip, but if it saves me headaches in the long run I will pay. Any experiences good/bad booking one way on 2 different airlines?

thx,
Linda

 

[Gina-Gina-Bo-Bina]

For our Christmas trip, we flew AirTran from BUF to MCO. Coming home, we flew JetBlue from MCO to BUF. No problems whatsoever.

 

[Where'sPiglet?]

This past April, I went to Disneyland. This is my experience with the flights. I'll let you decide if booking round trip or single flights is better.

I originally booked round trip on Delta. However, they changed my return flight by 7 hours. The flight out was still a nonstop at a great time for me, so I wanted to keep that flight and cancel the return leg and rebook on another airline. Not possible. I had to cancel the entire round trip, and rebook the flight out as a one way.

I then booked the return flight with United and was actually able to get even more time in the park on the last day. Originally, I was supposed to fly out at 6:30pm; Delta changed it to 11:30am. On United, I found a nonstop that left at about 1:00am the next morning. I actually was able to see World of Color on my last night.

After booking all this, I decided to tack on a trip to New York City at the front end of my Disneyland trip. Long story, but yes I was going to fly from New Orleans to NYC, then nonstop to LA for DL and then back from LAX to New Orleans. I couldn't book round trip for that because I wasn't going round trip, and I already had some of the flights booked so I couldn't book a 3 leg trip either. I had to book singles. I booked JetBlue from MSY (New Orleans) to JFK and then JetBlue from JFK to LAX.

So....up until the night before my flight, I had this booked (all single legs):
MSY - JFK on JetBlue
JFK - LAX on JetBlue
MSY- LAX on Delta (hadn't yet canceled)
LAX - MSY on United

Just as I was going online to cancel my Delta flight and pay the fee, I got an email from JetBlue. It was the day that Boston was locked down due to the marathon bombing suspect search, and my JB plane was coming in from Boston-Logan and my flight out the next morning was canceled since the plane didn't leave Boston.

I called up JetBlue; they had rebooked me for the flight the following morning 24 hours later, but since I was only going to be in NYC a few days anyways, I didn't want to fly for such a short time since I was also flying all the way to Disneyland. JetBlue was fantastic. They canceled both my flights for free, even though they were not round trip and they were likely under no obligation to cancel the JFK-LAX leg of my trip since it was not linked to the affected flight and it was not round trip. And they did all this on a night when the call center was dealing with flight issues from severe weather in the Chicago area and the crazy situation in Boston.

In summary:
-Round trip flight was a little annoying when one flight was changed substantially. It would have been a bigger problem if the flight I had wanted to keep had gone up in price when I had to rebook.
-Single flights could have been an issue when one flight was changed substantially and I needed to cancel both.
-Flying different airlines down/back was not an issue on the actual trip.

 

[Thumper4me]

As long as you are flying in and out of the same airport, I don't see any problems. We always park at the airport so it would be tough to fly out of one and into another.

I have done this on several occassions with no problems. Good luck!!

Kelly

 

[Best Aunt]

I had to get to Portland OR for a conference. It seemed like one of those "you can't get there from here" situations.

I ended up flying Southwest out of Airport # 1 to get there, and I flew JetBlue to Airport # 2 to get home.

I didn't want to fly SouthWest home, because I felt like the layover was too short. (I was booking this right when they were announcing the furloughs that we thought could cause a lot of flight delays.)

I didn't want to fly JetBlue there, because they would have had me flying South to connect to a flight to go north, and because I would have been arriving, exhausted, at midnight.

It worked out fine for me. However, I got rides to/from the airports, so I didn't have to worry about returning to the same airport where I left my car.

 

[n2mm]

done is many times, never a problem at all. We are thinking of doing UA out of Dulles down and Jetblue into DCA (Reagan) home.

 

[MKFan-PR]

We've done it quite a few times with no problems. It's sometimes called a "hacker fare". Kayak will actually show this option if the combined price is competitive with RT prices on one airline.

It used to be that booking separate one-way tickets would be more expensive than booking a RT ticket, but when carriers like SW and JB (and a few others) started pricing each flight individually, you now have the alternative of booking each one separately.

You would have an issue if you already had a RT ticket and you would like to cancel only one of the "legs", like a PP said. Some airlines don't allow you to do it (or at least make it very difficult and costly).