Most people search the airport they know. Fares don't care what you know - they follow competition, and competition often lives at the airport 90 minutes away. Here's how to shop a whole area's airports at once, and how not to lose the saving on the ground.
Airlines and search systems use two kinds of 3-letter codes. Airport codes name a physical field: CDG, ORY, LHR, JFK. City codes (also called metropolitan codes) name a group of them: PAR is "any Paris airport" (CDG, ORY, BVA…), LON covers six London fields, NYC covers JFK, LaGuardia and Newark. Searching a city code is the cheapest form of nearby-airport shopping - it's built into the fare data itself. In WRVR you can type either: pick "All Paris airports" and results may arrive at CDG and leave from ORY, priced independently.
City codes only group same-city airports. The bigger wins come from crossing city - even country - lines: Prague or Vienna, Milan or nearby Bergamo, Tel Aviv with a look at nearby alternatives. Keeping a mental list per region is exactly the kind of bookkeeping a search engine should do for you.
In WRVR, each side of the search has a + nearby airports radius: set 250 km around your typed airport and every scheduled field inside the circle joins the search, automatically. Results from radius-added airports are badged and show the distance to the airport you actually typed, so nothing sneaks in unnoticed. A "same country only" toggle keeps the circle from crossing borders when that matters (visas, rental-car returns, phone plans).
On the destination side the radius has a second job for round trips: it sets how far from your arrival city the return may depart - which is how open-jaw pairings like "into Milan, home from Venice" get made. That mechanic has its own guide.
The alternative airport is only cheaper after you land. Do this arithmetic before celebrating:
One more refinement worth knowing: connections to a nearby airport rarely make sense - if you're going to accept a stop, you might as well fly to the airport you actually wanted. WRVR encodes this as a stops mode: "direct to nearby, up to 1 stop to exact" - radius-added airports must be nonstop, your typed destination may take a connection. It keeps the wider net from filling with itineraries that combine the worst of both.
Search with a radius on WRVR →