Hidden City Ticketing Study: San Francisco (Revised)

August 19, 2014

Updating our study on San Francisco with current airfares, we found that:

Airfares to Washington were almost always lower using Hidden City Ticketing
Huge wins continued to exist for flights to Atlanta and Boston
Good chances to save could be found for Honolulu, New York, Dallas and San Diego
Flights to Las Vegas, Chicago, Denver, Seattle and Los Angeles were less fruitful

Note: In our prior study, we compared lowest airfares between two cities using FlyShortcut’s hidden city ticketing vs. conventional flights found by Google Flight Search. By default, Google Flight Search lists non-stop flights as well as flights with multiple stops, while our search engine only surfaces direct flights. To ensure we compare apples-to-apples, our new methodology only considers airfares for direct flights.

Below is a city-by-city analysis for all the nerds out there - we love you. You can also try our search engine to find flights you’re interested in:

The Big Winners:

San Francisco to Washington (DCA, IAD, BWI)

99% arbitrage frequency

Hidden city ticketing beats conventional airfares on most days (89 / 90 days we analyzed) - on average by $64.

San Francisco to Atlanta (ATL)

51% arbitrage frequency

Hidden city ticketing beats conventional airfares on most days (46 / 90 days we analyzed) - on average by $101.

San Francisco to Boston (BOS)

44% arbitrage frequency

Hidden city ticketing beats conventional airfares on most days (40 / 90 days we analyzed) - on average by $28.

Occasional Savings:

San Francisco to Honolulu (HNL)

31% arbitrage frequency

Hidden city ticketing beats conventional airfares on most days (28 / 90 days we analyzed) - on average by $21.

San Francisco to New York City (JFK, LGA, EWR)

28% arbitrage frequency

Hidden city ticketing beats conventional airfares on most days (25 / 90 days we analyzed) - on average by $94.

San Francisco to Dallas (DFW)

12% arbitrage frequency

Hidden city ticketing beats conventional airfares on most days (11 / 90 days we analyzed) - on average by $83.

San Francisco to San Diego (SAN)