Said It Here

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.

  1. 1
    Using the multi-city search option on airline websites
  2. 2
    Booking separate one-way tickets for each leg
  3. 3
    Buying refundable tickets to use as proof of departure
  4. 4
    Doing two separate one-way searches
  5. 5
    Using alternative flight search engines like Google Flights
  6. 6
    Doing separate bookings for each leg and manually calculating combinations

In their words

Unedited, most upvoted first, 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 ↗

Capable-Toe-9841 · r/travel · 1 upvotes

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 combinationsource ↗

Mfhm0999899 · r/travel · 1 upvotes

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 ↗

TraditionalDepth6924 · r/travel

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 southwestsource ↗

Mfhm0999899 · r/travel

Where this came up

People with this problem also raised