One of the most distressing things that can happen after your exhausting search for cheap tickets is getting onto the plane, finding your seat and sinking back into it in a state of exhaustion. You feel someone drop into the seat next to you and you open one eye and ask, “How much did you pay for that seat?” The answer, which is always about 20 percent less than yours, can cause an instant heart attack. Here is where your cheap tickets come from. Almost all purchased air fares in the U.S and Canada are "filed" by the airlines continuously each day to a clearing house in Washington DC called ATPCO (Airline Tariff Publishing Company). ATPCO is owned by several dozen airlines and acts as the distribution hub for over 60 million air fare filed worldwide. Each airline files their air fares continuously during the day to ATPCO where they are aggregated and distributed to all "subscribers" at specific times. For U.S/Canadian fares distribution occurs on weekdays at 10:00am, 12:30pm and 8:00pm and on weekends at 5:00pm EST. The airlines and online agencies then load these fares onto their quoting/booking systems within 2-6 hours. The evening feeds are loaded between 12:00am and 1:30am the next day. Air fares are filed in a price ladder - cheap ticket price to highest. This price ladder allows the airlines the flexibility to control the price that they will sell you a particular seat. This price range can be quite startling with a gap of over $1,000 from lowest to highest. Obviously, their goal is to sell as many of the highest price seats that consumers are willing to buy. This is where the black magic of who gets the cheapest for a particular seat begins. There are normally several dozen airfare price points in a particular city pair. The fares include many rules which allow the airline flexibility on restricting the lowest price seats. These rule restrictions include: passenger type, day/time, seasons, flight restrictions, advance purchase, minimum stay, maximum stay, fare combinations, surcharges, travel periods and sales restrictions. This means a particular seat can be sold at dozens of different prices based on a fare and its rules Tens of thousands of air fares change each day. This is where the cheap tickets are hiding. The subscribers to this raw air fare and rule information are the companies who sell the cheap tickets to the guy next to you.