Mixed cabin and open-jaw award tricks for EuroBonus

Once you have the basics of award booking down, two tricks will rescue trips that would otherwise fall apart. Neither is complicated. Both are underused, mostly because people do not know they are options.

Mixed cabin awards

The problem: you want Business Class the whole way, but there is no Business award space for one of the legs. The usual reaction is to give up and look at other dates. The better move is a mixed cabin booking.

A mixed cabin award lets you take Business on the leg where it is available, usually the long one, and economy on the leg where it is not, usually a short feeder or connection. You do not get the bed on the short hop, but the short hop is not where the bed matters. You still get the comfortable seat for the hours that count, on a date that actually works.

This is especially handy for Nordic travelers. Often the long-haul leg out of a hub like Copenhagen, Paris or Amsterdam has Business space, while the short feeder from your home city does not. Mixing cabins lets you take that long-haul Business seat instead of waiting for the stars to align on both legs.

Open-jaw routings

The problem: rigid round trips waste flexibility. A standard return flies you out to a city and back from the same city. But trips are not always shaped like that. Maybe you want to fly into Rome, travel up through Italy, and fly home from Milan. Booking two separate one-ways is clumsy and can cost more.

An open-jaw award handles this in one booking: you fly out to one city and return from a different one. It fits how people actually travel, it can use your points more efficiently than two separate tickets, and it opens up itineraries a plain round trip cannot.

Open-jaw is also a quiet availability hack. If there is no award seat home from your arrival city but there is from a nearby one, an open-jaw lets you take it instead of being stuck.

How to find these

Both tricks depend on seeing options most searches hide. The Bonussøk search surfaces mixed cabin results, so when Business is not open the whole way it can still build you a workable trip rather than showing nothing. For open-jaw and multi-city itineraries, the open-jaw search is built to find returns from a different city than you departed.

Worth keeping in your back pocket

You will not need these on every booking. But the day a trip looks impossible because one leg has no Business space, or because a tidy round trip does not fit your plans, these two tactics are what turn a dead end into a booked flight. Keep them in mind and far fewer of your trips will fall through.