In case you haven't noticed, the length of a trip has very little to do with the cost of an airline ticket.

I start out with that little piece of information because people are always saying things like, "THAT'S CRAZY!" when they discover something like the fact that a ticket to Dallas costs eight times the price of a ticket to Louisville, and the plane to Louisville stops in Dallas. The price you pay has more to do with two things: first, the amount of traffic going from here to there on a daily basis; and second, the nature of the competition to that destination. And, now that I think of it, reverse those two factors - the number one reason for low air fares is the nature of the competition. If either Southwest Airlines, and now, to some extent, Jet Blue (the low fare carriers out of Salt Lake), have service to where you want to go, the cost if tickets on every airline will usually be lower. That's why it's a good idea to find nearby alternate cities to fly into, when neither Southwest nor Jet Blue fly to where you want to go. For example, Ft. Lauderdale is only 30 miles from Miami, and is routinely $250 less expensive to fly into. Yup, Southwest flies to Ft. Lauderdale. And that's why Baltimore-Washington is almost always less expensive than Dulles or Reagan-National. Before Jet Blue started service to JFK, nearby Islip and Hartford were the best "alternate destinations." Instead of Boston, try Providence or Manchester. Chicago's Midway Airport never costs more, and usually much less, than O'Hare to use. Oakland routinely beats San Francisco, and getting to downtown San Francisco from Oakland is a lot easier than from SFO. LAX is almost always less than the John Wayne Orange County Airport; and soon, with Jet Blue's coming service in to and out of Long Beach, look for some discounts into that airport.

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