You may save hundreds of dollars if you split your international journey into different legs and buy separate tickets for each leg. For example, rather than buy a single ticket for direct flights between Chicago and Barcelona for $1,000, you may be able to buy two tickets -- one for a round-trip ticket between Chicago and New York City for $200 and another for a round-trip ticket between New York City and Barcelona for $600 -- and save about $200.

The quickest way to figure out if you can save by booking two tickets is to figure out if there is a hub airport that funnels most American travelers to your overseas destination. Then, look into reserving separate tickets to and from that hub.

For instance, Miami is the hub for flights to most destinations in South America and the Caribbean, meaning that a majority of Americans flying southward internationally pass through Miami's airport instead of, say, either Houston or Atlanta. Another hub airport is Los Angeles' LAX, which is the main funnel for people heading to Australia, the South Pacific, and Asia. New York City's airports are common layover spots for most of the planes crossing the Atlantic to Europe and points beyond.

We recently tested this approach for a round-trip between Houston and Sydney. Our initial searches on a few travel Web sites didn't turn up any nonstop flights between the two cities, but we did find multi-stop tickets. Delta's best fare between Houston and Sydney in November was $1,012, with a stop in Los Angeles. That caught our eye. If there's a large number of flights to Australia passing through L.A., then the City of Angels might offer bargain direct flights to Down Under -- because the greater volume of flights often prompts a greater number of fare sales. So we checked out fares between L.A. and Sydney. It turns out they started at $652.

Next, we did a quick search for round-trip airfares on flights between Houston and Los Angeles. We found flights for $252, bringing our two-flight total to $904 -- for a savings of 11 percent over Delta's flight for $1,012.

If you decide to book two tickets on two different airlines, be sure to allow extra time to make your connections, and consider buying good travel insurance to make sure you're covered in the event of a problem. You can save money on insurance policies by buying them directly from an insurer, such as industry giant TravelGuard, rather than through a middleman, who will charge a marked-up price.