[ajoseps]

I'm confused as to how to actually book a flight through this. I selected NYC->SFO and found some flights I'm interested in. When I click through, I get redirected to another site e.g. trip.com. I try searching for the flight in question on the actual airline's page and nothing comes up for it.

I'm guessing I'm misunderstanding how flights are booked on planes. Does trip.com act as a wholesaler or something of that sort?

[maxmorlocke]

We don't handle the booking, we redirect you to the travel site that we found the best price on. Many online travel search agencies and metasearch sites can put together itineraries the airlines don't offer directly.

[ajoseps]

just out of curiosity, why don't they offer these directly?

[maxmorlocke]

As a simple example, United probably isn't going to offer a flight where one leg is on United and another is on American. Yet, it might be substantially cheaper or less painful to take that flight. Certain codeshares may be more profitable for them to hawk, to the point where they will only show certain legs when the more profitable flight is booked. They may also choose not to show flights that are already profitable based on bookings (e.g. takes 75 economy seats to make flight with legs A->B and B->C profitable) when a similar flight (A->D, D->C) is underbooked and could use some more folks aboard. There are probably a thousand other reasons...