Two prices for one flight
 

I was looking at a round trip flight from Cleveland to San Diego. Continental offers tickets for about $333; Northwest offers tickets for $218. What puzzles me is that both offers are for the same flight, a Continental flight! How can there be such a disparity in the offering prices for the same ticket. Unless I misunderstand, I can use the miles earned with the Northwest ticket in my Continental frequent flyer program, so why pay Continental more for the same thing?

I am not convinced that this "code sharing" is passenger friendly to be quite honest.I ran into the same situation with a ticket to Capetown----if I boought the American codeshare version it would have been $450 more than the SouthAfrican ticket....same plane same situation.....

Absolutely. It pays to shop around. When we went to France this summer, there was a $200 per person difference between Delta and Air France for the same exact flights!

I had the same question in February for a late March flight from D.C. to Munich. At united.com, I had a choice of the UA flight at $409, or the Lufthansa flight "operated by United" for $303. The exact same plane. Dirt cheap, tax included, roundtrip, nonstop, for $303.

Someone here explained that United sold a batch of the seats to Lufthansa for Lufthansa to offer to their customers. They didn't sell them well, I suppose, and unloaded them.

There are so many seats for each class (different fares). If NWA hasn't sold out the seats they have on hold, they can still sell at a lower price than Continental who has used up their seats.