As I've been saying in the various travel blogs that I write for, including this one, the cheap airfares that Americans have grown smugly used to, are now officially a thing of the past. The culprit is rising fuel costs, which are linked to the rising price of oil, which is now hovering around $100 a barrel and may push beyond that in the near future. As a report on the radio show All Things Considered stated, "Air travel has gotten more expensive as the price of fuel has increased. That has many families reconsidering whether to buy plane tickets for the holidays." Has your decision to travel or not during the holidays been impacted by the absence of cheap airfare tickets? Have you been unable to find the dirt cheap airline tickets that were available in years past? Well, join the club. This year, many travellers who had built their travel plans around cheap airline tickets to Florida or other destinations to visit relatives are finding themselves sorely disappointed. According to Terry Trippler, an airfare analyst who runs the tripplertravel.com website, quoted in the same article, "The bottom line is fuel. That's No. 1," Trippler said. "Demand has something to do with it, too. As long as the people are buying it, the airlines will continue to increase fares." The message here is clear: don't expect really cheap airline tickets to return any time soon. This fall may be the very last gasp of cheap airline tickets for years to come.

With the airline ticket prices so high and airlines services so low, finding the cheap airfare tickets has become almost impossible. However, with a little investigation, you may be able to find an excellent source of cheap airfare tickets that can be used every time you need cheap last minute airline tickets. An airline ticket consolidator is a person or company that purchases tickets in big numbers at a special price that are sold by most major Airline Companies to help fill seats. I know this sounds very close to a ticket scalper, but unlike the beating that your wallet takes with a ticket scalper, using an airline ticket consolidator to buy the cheap airfare tickets is the muscle rub to your beat up wallet. With this arrangement the Airline companies are guaranteed a set amount of revenues, the consolidator makes his money and you have the luxury of looking around the plane trying to figure out who is the greatest sucker who paid full price on board. An even better approach for the cheap airfare tickets is to use the same consolidator, but if you wait till the last minute, the consolidator is bound to give you a great price to cut his losses and this is how you get to buy a last minute discounted airline ticke