A few days ago, Kayak introduced a new feature called Hacker Fares on its fare search. Hackers Fares are 2 one-way fares presented to you as a possible fare. Kayak then redirects you to the airlines to book. This feature only shows up when the 2 one-way fares are lower than a roundtrip fare.

Around the same time, a friend of The Flight Deal team emailed us to ask if we had any tips on potentially finding a lower price for a LaGuardia to Tampa weekend getaway on Labor Day – our friend wanted to leave NY after work Friday and leave Tampa after lunch. This is what we found based on a non-flexible travel schedule:

$537 for a roundtrip ticket.

$537 for a weekend getaway to Tampa is not something that we’d recommend anyone do unless they really need to be there. We went to ITASoftware to do a quick search and found a $154 flight that fit for the non-flexible travel schedule.

$154 for the outbound

Then we did a search for the reverse and found a $298 JetBlue fare that fit with the schedule.

$298!

15 minutes of searching saved our friend $85. This tip will most likely only work with domestic trips as domestic tickets are mostly priced as one-ways and bookable as such; that, however, is rarely the case with international fares.