Originally Posted by
Air Houston
Once at EWR I noticed the flight board had about fifteen flights to IAH. It was only after examining them more closely did I realize that many of them were one-stops (MSY, BNA, MCO, ATL, etc). I’m sure there were many more combinations possible using connections. And I’ve seen ORD-DEN connecting in OMA and DSM offered occasionally.
if you want to see lots of unexpected connections try an award search IAH-DEN. It shows options with plane changes at a bunch of airports.
Almost certainly these 'connections' are more about flight numbering than actually selling the connection through. At some point, you run out, and I'm sure I've seen threads from years ago saying they did. So doing them in this way saves a few. Flight 342 EWR-BNA-IAH saves a flight number vs. UA 342 EWR-BNA and UA 350 BNA-IAH (as an example). Multiply that by ten and hundreds of flights, and you save a lot. It also is often done as those kind of direct flights with a stop show up above connections on the GDS. It wouldn't be that way for these kind of flights, as obviously, there are lots of UA flights hub-to-hub without a stop, but, for example, MSP-ORD-TPA might use the same flight number so that a GDS would prioritize this 'direct' UA flight over AA,via CLT as a connection with separate flight numbers. Even in this case, the 'direct' flight on UA would essentially be just like the AA connection except the flight number would be the same....it could be the same time at the stop, and even likely that there would be an aircraft change, and possibly even a different aircraft type. And just like a connection, the second aircraft might not hold for those booked through