One-way pricing and multi-city trips without overpaying
The old rule was simple: one-way tickets cost almost as much as returns, so you always bought the round trip. Budget carriers broke that rule - and once one-ways price fairly, whole categories of trip become cheap: open-jaws, city-hopping routes, and returns you haven't decided yet.
How one-way pricing changed
Legacy airlines historically priced tickets as journeys: the round trip was the product, and a one-way was priced to punish (often 60-80% of the return fare). Low-cost carriers - Ryanair, Wizz, easyJet and their peers worldwide - price every leg independently: a one-way is simply half the inventory. Competition pushed much of short-haul pricing to this model, so on most intra-Europe, intra-Asia, and many domestic routes, two one-ways now cost about the same as a round trip - sometimes less, when the cheap days of each direction don't line up on one carrier.
Long-haul is the holdout: intercontinental one-ways on legacy carriers can still cost 70-100% of the round trip. Always compare before assuming either way.
What independent legs unlock
Mix carriers freely. Fly out on whoever is cheap Tuesday, home on whoever is cheap Sunday. A single round-trip fare can't do that.
Open-jaw routes. Into one city, home from another - just two one-ways that don't share an airport. (Full guide: cheap open-jaw flights.)
Asymmetric flexibility. Book the fixed leg now, keep the flexible leg open. Useful when the return date depends on work, weather, or how much you like the place.
City-hopping. A → B → C → home is three cheap one-ways, not a hacked-together round trip with a "stopover".
The traps, priced in
Bags multiply. Each ticket sells its own baggage. Two one-ways with a 20 kg bag can add €40-100 to the naive comparison. Carry-on-only travellers keep almost all the one-way advantage.
No through-checking, no protection. Separate tickets mean separate contracts: if leg one is late and you miss leg two, nobody owes you a rebooking. Leave generous buffers when chaining one-ways on the same day - or better, don't.
Onward-travel checks. Several countries (and many airlines at check-in) want proof you're leaving. A one-way in with no booked exit can mean questions; hold your outbound booking where you can show it.
Long-haul penalties persist. Transatlantic and similar: price the round trip too, always.
Planning a multi-city route properly
Multi-city forms on most engines ask you to fix every city and every date, then quote one number. That's the wrong order: the point of a hop trip is that dates and even the order of stops have slack in them, and the fares should decide.
In WRVR, the Multi-city trip type gives you a route builder designed around that slack:
Per-stop nights ranges. "2-4 nights in Rome, then 3-5 in Athens" - each stop has its own min-max, and every valid date split is priced across your departure window.
Return home, or don't. A checkbox adds the final hop back to your origin - or leave it off and end the trip at the last city (say, where a friend's wedding is).
Cheapest stop order. With "Let WRVR pick the cheapest order", the engine permutes your middle stops and keeps the best-priced sequence. Rome → Athens → Istanbul and Rome → Istanbul → Athens can differ meaningfully once each leg finds its own cheap day; you shouldn't have to guess which.
Every hop is an ordinary one-way ticket on whatever carrier priced it best, so nothing about the itinerary is exotic at the gate - it's just well-shopped.
A worked example of the mindset
Say you have 12-16 days in May for Italy and Greece, flying from your home airport. The fixed-itinerary approach picks cities and dates and gets one quote. The flexible approach hands the engine: home → [Rome 2-4 nights] → [Athens 3-5 nights] → [Crete 4-6 nights] → home, departing anywhere in a two-week window - and lets it place every leg on its cheap day and try both island/mainland orders. The itinerary that comes back is one you might never have tried by hand, at a total assembled from each hop's best fare rather than one carrier's package.