Advanced Hidden City Tickets with checked baggage

A lot of people already know hidden city ticketing and how to save money on flights with it. This trick became popular by the flightsearch enginge skiplagged that looks for tricked tickets in particular. However there is one big disadvantage: You cannot check your bags, as they would end up at the final destination of the ticket. In this article we explain how hidden city tickets can be booked with checked baggage.

It is uncontroversial that nonstop flights are the most comfortable way to fly and that's why the demand for direct flights is high. Thus airline charge significant more for those connections and one or more stop routes are cheaper than nonstop flights, although more miles are flown. However, the good news is, it is possible to exploit this pricing strategy.

The idea of hidden city ticketing is to end your journey on a stopover. If you want to fly from A to B, you book a ticket from A to C with a stopover in B. Once you arrive in B you just depart and "miss" your flight to C.

The disadvantage of usual hidden city ticket is, that you cant check any luggage, as this will be transfered to the final destination. You might ask to not check the luggage through at checkin, however this can be turned down or result in extra costs.

However there are two strategies on how to book a hidden city ticken with checked baggage.

1. Overnight stopover
The first strategy is to choose a flight with the longest possible stopover, if possible overnight. Thus you can easily pick up your bag from the luggage belt.
You start by looking for a good hidden city offer on skiplagged skiplagged or Matrix. Once you found a good connection, you try to maximize the layover. You can also try to split up the flight into two legs and book a multicity flight A -> B, B -> A with a long layouver in B.

2. Surface sector
Another but more complicated strategy includes a so called surface sector, that the passenger does not travel by plane. Thus the bags have to be given out. Connection with surface sector are harder to find, but they can be even cheaper that usual hidden city tickets.
If you would buy a ticket A -> B -> C (and exit in B) with this trick you look for a multicity flight with 2 legs: A -> B, D -> C.
D can be any airport, but usually it works best when D is close to B.

How to
And this is how you find advanced hidden city tickets: At first you check Skiplagged for good offers.
You might also want to check matrix.itasoftware.com and use the radius feature in combination with a given stopover.

Once you have found a good connection you can either try to maximize the layover (1.) or to add a surface sector to the booking (2.).
You look for a multicity trip with 2 legs. The first leg is the route you actually want to fly (A -> B). As departure airport of the second leg you use the nearby feature for any airport around B. The arrival airport is C, the last airport of the original hidden city connection.

Example
Let's say we look for a roundtrip from Europe to San Francisco. Flight from Scandinavian airports are significantly cheaper than from German airports Die For example the following connection with Lufthansa costs 288€, a good price to San Francisco.

Prices from Germany on the same dates cost 550€ and up. When you're ok with a positioning flight to Stockholm in order to start the international journey there, you could easily exit the inbound flight in Munich and simply miss the flight back to Stockholm. However you bags would go to Stockholm as they are checked through to the final airport of the ticket.
Now you can try to postpone the last flight von Munich to Stockholm by one day:

This connection has a overnight layover in Munich. Thus you can access your bags in Munich.

You can also try to change the departure airport of the last flight. For example you can book this connection, where the baggage will be checked until Munich.

Hidden city ticketing is great to save some money on flights. With advanced hidden city ticketing as described in this post, you can even travel with checked baggage .

Let experts do the work for you and create a flight request now.