Can I buy an ‘open’ ticket to Barbados?

Plane Talk: The price of flexibility is uncomfortably high, with airlines seeking to fill their planes and extract as much revenue as possible from each seat

Distant shore: A cottage on the south coast of Barbados (Simon Calder)

“I have Barbadian heritage and am contemplating retiring there,” a reader writes from London. “I aim to fly out to Barbados next month and stay there for between three and six months while I decide whether to emigrate.”

Sounds an idyllic plan. But, she continues: “I want to buy what I understand to be an ‘open’ ticket, so I can come back whenever I Iike. But I can’t see how to book one.” Let me try to help.

In the olden days, when flights were, for most people, prohibitively expensive, “open” tickets were common. If you could afford to buy a plane ticket, then you could choose a return date within a year. What with fares being so high, flight loads were generally light and you would be very likely to find a seat whenever you wished.

Today, the idea of an open ticket has more or less vanished. Most of us commit to specific flights, knowing it will be expensive or impossible to change them. The closest equivalent to an open ticket is a flexible return. But you pay a fortune for the benefit of being able to change travel dates without penalty.

To illustrate the difference, I made some test bookings on British Airways from London Heathrow to Barbados: flying out on 1 May and returning five months later, on 1 October.

The fully flexible fare is currently £2,591, and allows you to change your dates or get a full refund without penalty. Effectively, it is an open ticket. But, inconveniently, it is almost three times as expensive as the cheapest economy fare, which is £883; if you are flexible with dates either way, you can slice a couple of hundred pounds off the cost.

With the less expensive ticket, BA says you can change each segment for a fee of £150 “plus any difference in fare”. The difference between the fare on the day you buy and the prevailing price on the day you decide to change is impossible to predict, but could easily run into hundreds of pounds. Even so, the best plan may be to book the lowest fare, come up with a plausible return date, and do your best to stick to it.

Hang on, though: what is wrong with the reasonable strategy of booking a one-way ticket, then sorting out the inbound leg separately?

Unfortunately, aviation is about as irrational as any industry could be. Remember that £883 round trip? If you book only the outbound segment, covering half the number of miles, the price from British Airways does not halve – it more than doubles, to £1,757 one way.

Fortunately, BA’s sister airline, Aer Lingus, can restore some sanity to the situation. Until the end of May, the Irish carrier flies from Manchester to Barbados. It has a simple single-leg pricing structure. For the journey outbound on 1 May, the fare is £643; add an extra £30 or so for the train fare from London, booked in advance.

Coming home, Aer Lingus will no longer be in contention. But there will be many other options, plus plenty of time to find the best deal. If British Airways and Virgin Atlantic are too expensive to London, then JetBlue via New York will save cash. Or perhaps another airline will have stepped up with fresh flights between Barbados and the UK.

To return to the original question: why do open tickets no longer really exist? Because airlines deploy the dark art of revenue management to fill as many seats as they can on each flight. By persuading many passengers to commit in advance, they can maximise the “load factor”. When performed effectively, this helps them extract the highest possible revenue. And that strategy, they would say, enables them to keep connecting the UK with beautiful Caribbean islands.