In that Birmingham example, we switched airports and airlines. Cincinnati is not served by a budget carrier like Southwest. So for the next example, let's stay with the same airline throughout and take a longer trip.
How about Los Angeles from Cincinnati? A recent search on the Delta.com Web site shows a round-trip, non-stop ticket purchased a month before departure will set us back $1361 USD. But if I choose to land in San Diego and drive up to Los Angeles, the Delta price drops to $821.
Now let's suppose I'm willing to drive on the front end of the trip, too. Lexington's Bluegrass Airport is just a one-hour drive from the Cincinnati airport. The Lexington round-trip fare to San Diego on Delta comes up at $519.
I now have $842 to pay for everything else on my trip, including the costs of rental cars. Lexington-San Diego is a little more than one-third the price of Cincinnati-Los Angeles! Imagine how this begins to add up when there are two or more in your party. Savings in the thousands of dollars are involved.
There's a quirky footnote to the above example. The Lexington flight makes one stop before heading west. You guessed it: the plane lands in Cincinnati. So much for trying to make sense of airfares. They have become so complicated, even the airlines don't understand them.
Remember, this is all on the same airline and for the same dates. Only the airports have been changed to protect the pocketbook.
Let's leave Delta and Cincinnati.
An Expedia.com airfare search between New York (JFK) and Los Angeles (LAX) revealed non-stop service on American for $390 USD. That's not a bad fare.
But both of those markets are served by multiple airports.
Newark to LAX on Continental non-stop is $340, a $50 reward for catching the plane 16 miles from JFK. Hartford to Ontario, CA with one stop will cost $258. We've added some driving and a stop each way, but we're now one-third cheaper than the original quote.
Still, if you make a reservation request and blindly ask for New York to Los Angeles, you're going to get the rates and airports that pop up on the operator's screen unless you also ask about the alternatives.
More information: Examples of shopping for airports around the world.
