Originally Posted by mjcoffey
My wife and I are both NW SE and we just got back from a trip to Maui. We were flying from OGG to LAX on seperate Continental tickets and the OGG to HNL leg was on Hawaiian. When we were checking in at OGG we were apparently flagged and SSSS was put on our boarding passes. When we got to security we were told we would be subject to further security review, i.e. wand and pat downs as well as having all of our carry on bags inspected by TSA. I asked the TSA guy before the metal detector why where flagged and he said the airline flagged us. He said he wasn't sure why, but it could have been any number of reasons, including, as he put it, "because they thought you looked funny."
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You answered your question yourself even though you did not know it.
You can read the Security forum, or do a search for SSSS and you will read that even though the ticket was bought as a through ticket, if it is on two different airlines it will show up in each airlines system as a one-way ticket. One way tickets are SSSS about 99.99% of the time. The TSA basically says that one-way fliers need more scrutiny so the airlines have set up their computers to flag you if it shows up in that airlines computer as a one-way ticket.
The screeners at the check points CAN NOT tell you what the criteria is. It is supposed to keep the terrorists confused. If they knew what the criteria was they could get around it.
So, it was not random, and it was not a one-time thing. If you had the same flights tomorrow, or next week, or next year, you would get the SSSS unless the criteria change between now and then.
If you don't want to be SSSSed, than DO NOT pay Cash, DO NOT buy a ticket at the last minute, or DO NOT appear that you are flying one-way. Even with codeshare flights, if you fly your outbound all on NW metal and your return all on CO metal, it will still show as a one way in the NW and the CO computers.