How to book multi destination flights without getting stuck at immigration
Immigration checkpoints often require proof of a return flight, making travelers question whether they should buy a multi-city itinerary, separate one-way tickets, or use a dummy return ticket. Getting this wrong risks being denied boarding or entry, though booking through a dedicated multi-stop flight search successfully avoids these complications.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Using the multi-city search option on airline websitesDid this help you?
- 2Booking separate one-way tickets for each legDid this help you?
- 3Buying refundable tickets to use as proof of departureDid this help you?
- 4Doing two separate one-way searchesDid this help you?
- 5Using alternative flight search engines like Google FlightsDid this help you?
- 6Doing separate bookings for each leg and manually calculating combinationsDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I used the multi-stop way to book my tickets and I've had zero issues.”source ↗
“Yeah google shows it to you under round trip so that I’m not having to do 2 seperate searches for every trip and do the math for every possible combination”source ↗
“Since immigration checkpoints usually require round-trip tickets, do you first buy the round-trip for the first country then cancel the return ticket later, or do you buy multi-city plus one-way separately?”source ↗
“it doesn’t let u pick departing flight and return flight separately unless you do multi city and then on the round trip it doesn’t show u different airlines mixed together.. it only shows united, delta or whatever for outbound and return.. for example for SFO to PITT I want outbound to be American but return southwest”source ↗
Where this came up
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