No matter whether you are flying to Chicago or to Atlanta or Ohio or Florida or LA or NYC, the basic strategies of getting the cheap airline tickets are the same:

- Plan your travel several days in advance. While booking your ticket almost two weeks before your departure, you might get an inexpensive ticket. The seats in most cases are located near the toilets. If that is not an issue with you then you can boast of bagging a good deal.

- Know the name of your airlines and give them a call. Often a lively one-to-one phone conversation might get you a cheap airline ticket that otherwise was not made public by the concerned airline.

- Browse through the travel engines that deal specifically in airline ticket search. Enter your destination, date of travel and the price range. The travel engines would run a complete search to get you the cheapest airfare possible. This process may require more than a day to run an extensive search.

- Buy tickets from bucket shops. These are air consolidates that have the legal permission to sell airline tickets at much discounted prices. The prices are often lower than what the airline offers.

- Try to fly to Chicago in the middle of the week. This is quite an effective and tried strategy. The airlines flying in the middle of the week often declares on spot offers in order to fill up their vacancy. Avoiding the flights on weekends and other major holidays will save huge bucks from draining out of your pocket.

Try to be part of frequent flier programs so that you can cash in your flier miles and reduce the cost of your airline ticket.