Yesterday I had my first occasion to find a significantly better fare from a source other than nwa.com....

I was booking IAH to ORD roundtrip with a DTW connection both ways - travel dates of Sept. 2 and 6.

Best fare on nwa.com was $328 round trip.

However on other sites, I was able to pull up a round trip fare of $195 when the very first segment (IAH-DTW) was a NW-coded flight on CO metal.

Using the class availability site, I could see that this segment was the only IAH departure in which there was full availability in the K fare bucket.

I tried several times to make this flight "appear" on nwa.com but without any luck.

I tried booking on the Carlson Wagonlit site
http://flyaow.com/classcwt.htm
because I use them so often to check fare buckets I don't mind shooting a little business their way, but it would not process the reservation.

So I used orbitz instead and it went through.

You can recreate this same booking as of right now with the same outcome. So don't necessarily assume that nwa.com offers the best fare. This was a difference of $126 even with the $6.99 fee on orbitz.

If you can find the $195 fare on nwa.com please tell me how!