routing changes out of IAH???
 

I was doing fare search on Expedia and doing IAH-SAN and IAH-SEA noticed that nothing at all came up for Northwest flights.

And this on nwa.com

No Northwest Airlines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, or codeshare partner flights were found between Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport, TX (IAH) and San Diego (All Locations), CA (SAN) that matched your request.

Whuzzup?

I assume you want to go through MSP or DTW to get to/from SAN and SEA? Had the same experience trying to get NW on some itineraries I was booking out of RNO. You can force the system to get you on NW metal by selecting a multi-city itinerary..... select IAH-MSP for the date you want to travel, then MSP-SAN for the same date. Reverse the procedure to come home.

Won't always be the cheapest fare, but it forces the system to get you into and out of one of the hubs....if of course that's your desire.

Good luck......

The weird thing is that this is all new. I have flown NW to SEA and SAN and in the past you could be routed through any of the hubs.

I will keep an eye on it to see if it is a fluke or a permanent change.

Something is going on. I looked up IAH-SEA and NW doesn't have any published fares for the route, according to expedia. Ditto for MSP-SEA on CO.

You can call it a "conspiracy" if you like: we will not compete with our partner on this route.
Or you can call it a "refusal": we do NOT want your business, if you want to fly between those two cities at some ridiculously low fare.
In any case, it is very similar to Southwest's concept that you can not choose your own routing between two cities, only the routings that they have determined that they will allow.
The concept is an extension of inventory management. They can sell a seat between IAH and MSP for far more $$ to someone going someplace else besides SEA, so they refuse to sell it to you if that is your destination.
Obviously, this whole subject is far too complicated to discuss here, and would be a good topic for a Doctoral Thesis, but it just goes to show you how much value there is for consumers in all of these Partnerships and Alliances! In spite of what they want us and regulators to believe, when two competing companies are allowed to get together and make joint decisions, the results are rarely beneficial to any of us customers.

This looks like a major shift. In the past, NW offered some pretty competitive fares on these routes (IAH-West Coast).

SFO-IAH just bit the dust this morning.

They did a crazy $138+ fare ($158 all in SFO-DTW-IAH), and now they're not publishing anything in that market.

Back when Delta was proposing linking up with NWA (and probably CO before), I said "this is gonna be bad for the customers"... and other people came back, insisting that code sharing is a good thing.

????

I wonder if those people would be saying the same thing now.

Although the NW PDF schedule shows NW codes on the CO flights from SEA to IAH, NWA.com would not route me through IAH to either DCA or FLL. Expedia would.

Plugging in SEA-IAH into the electronic timetable showed connections through MSP, DTW, MEM and even a CO to CO connection in CLE. But it's as if there are no direct flights from SEA to IAH.

So much for nwa.com.....

I've been noticing this on a variety of CO codeshares. From my home airport, there are certain routes that nwa.com will only show via IAH and others only through EWR, even though a search on another site (continental.com, travelocity.com, expedia.com, or even orbitz.com) will show both routings and let me choose.

Usually, I prefer to route through EWR if I have to fly on CO metal because CO only flys RJs out of CVG. I can take an RJ for an hour and a half, but three hours on one to IAH from here sounds like torture! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif

I'm currently looking to do a Latin America trip that nwa.com will only book via IAH. I'm going to try calling on the phone for reservations and see if I can get them to book me on the routing I want. Otherwise, I guess I'll grab it from which ever one of the three (Orbitz, Expedia, or Travelocity) has it cheaper. Does anyone know if those PD316/317 certs can be used on Orbitz, Expedia, or Travelocity?

NW likes to play with their routings... within the past year they made MSP a valid connection city for LAN/MBS/FNT - MCO. They talked about cracking down on unusual routings... I guess this doesn't surprise me.

Now that load factors are getting up to reliable bumping levels, NWA probably feels more free to not compete on routes that include partner's hub cities.

Instead of flying more planes, they'll just continue flying fewer and selling the seats for as much revenue as the market will bear.

This makes business sense, but it's certainly a boner for customers and for the anti-trust suits who approved these codeshare deals.

I'm certain that NW's routings ex-IAH (e.g. IAH-DTW-LAX) were attractive to only a few people - most of them wanting the miles...

like me!

I'm surprised to see IAH-SEA via MSP gone.


[This message has been edited by Watchful (edited 10-06-2003).]

or people who prefer Northwest service or planes over whatever Continental was offering on the same route.

Has NWA pulled routing for city pairs that Delta has a lock on, e.g. destinations out of Atlanta?