You see advertisements for cheap airline tickets all over the place. They saturate the Internet, television, and newspapers for good reason. Nobody wants to pay $800 for an airline ticket when they can get something pretty similar for half the price or less. Cheap airline tickets have become a business all their own with fare comparison sites, auctions, and bidding sites. Travel agents used to have to do most of the footwork for us but with most people able to access the Internet, it's just as easy to do it yourself.
Fare comparison sites are usually the first stop for people looking to buy cheap airline tickets. These sites check prices from many different companies that offer the flight you are looking for. This will give you a ton of options if you are traveling from a large city to another large city but if you are traveling somewhere fairly small, you might not have many options at all. To get better results and cheaper tickets, you can change the arrival and departure dates by a day or two to see if the prices go down. You can also include airports in nearby cities. Though inconvenient, you can save quite a bit of money by skipping your local airport and using one in a larger city nearby.
Auction sites frequently offer cheap airline tickets that are almost too good to be true. This could be because the person who has the tickets had a change of plans, or due to some type of promotion. If a new resort opens, they may offer cheap airline tickets to help bring in customers.