Back in the day (I haven't checked lately) if you bought a round trip ticket from, say, LA-NY-LA, the price was significantly lower if you stayed in NY over the

Back in the day (I haven't checked lately) if you bought a round trip ticket from, say, LA-NY-LA, the price was significantly lower if you stayed in NY over the weekend because the airlines assumed that if you didn't stay for the weekend you were a business traveler who was writing off the expense while if you stayed over the weekend you were a cost-conscious tourist. Clever people who needed to make two closely spaced round trips would book one ticket LA-NY-LA and a second ticket NY-LA-NY. They would fly out to NY on Monday on ticket #1, return home to LA on Friday using ticket #2, go back to NY the following Monday using ticket #2 and return to LA the following Friday using the second half of ticket #1. Both tickets stayed at their mid point over a weekend, so they paid the lower fare. This was easy to do before airline security increased due to 9/11 because there were no TSA checkpoints (anyone remember when you could meet arriving passengers at the gate? and airlines didn't really check ID when boarding, so you could book the two tickets with a slight misspelling of your name and the agents at the gate would let you board.