Yes and no. Sometimes a flight going out of one of those tiny airports and continuing from the hub is paradoxically cheaper than taking the same flight from the

Yes and no. Sometimes a flight going out of one of those tiny airports and continuing from the hub is paradoxically cheaper than taking the same flight from the hub. A friend of mine will occasionally drive from Atlanta to South Carolina to save a few hundred dollars on a flight leaving Atlanta. It's more that airports are only so big. It's expensive to build a new terminal, so if one airline takes over most of an airport, the others can't turn it into a hub. If you don't mind a layover, that's not a big deal. If you want nonstop from your nearest airport, the airline that made it a hub will be able to charge you more. But that's only fair, because they invested the capital in making that airport a hub. If they over-invested, that's a lot of capital lost.