One of the advantages of the one way tickets the budget airlines sell is that you can always use a different airline for your return trip. This can often result in big savings. But few people have started to use this trick.

Let us illustrate how this can work.

We wanted to book at trip from Stockholm to Istanbul in August, just before school starts here in Sweden. A complication is that Turkey is not yet an EU country, and therefore does not have a lot of budget airlines.

We found a good ticket to Turkey with Snowflake, the SAS brand name for low fare tickets. But the return proved to be a tougher nut to crack. Probably because many Turkish immigrants living in Sweden are returning from their summer vacations in Turkey.

So we had to find another route.

Air Baltic, also in the SAS Business Group, turns out to have a low fare route between Istanbul and Riga. But the connection from Riga to Stockholm was a bit pricey, even though in that scenario they would handle the luggage all the way to Stockholm.

But within three hours of the Riga arrival there is a Ryanair flight available to Stockholm Skavsta Airport, at a very good price.

In the end, the cost of the return trip was less than half of what we would have paid with Snowflake. And my son returned from his vacation without any problems.

So use the advantages of one way tickets. Fly a different way home.