Booking a flight itinerary involving multiple airlines that don't codeshare

WildaBeast
Fri, 19 Sep 2025 21:25:26 +0000
Factual Questions

I live near Sacramento, CA (SMF). My parents live in La Crosse, WI (LSE). I’m likely going to want to book a flight between these two cities for the holidays. However, it’s proving to be rather difficult.

LSE is a tiny airport, currently only served by American Airlines from Chicago O’Hare. AA no longer offers a non-stop flight from SMF to ORD that time of year (apparently it’s a summer only seasonal flight now). But United does, and it arrives with plenty of time to connect to AA’s flight to LSE. So the most convenient way to get there is to fly to ORD on UA and then connect to LSE on AA. Now I know I could just book these flights as separate tickets, but then I would have no recourse if UA’s flight was late or canceled and I missed my connection to AA’s flight. There should be some way to book this itinerary as one ticket, an “interline” itinerary in airline parlance. But I cannot figure out how.

Searching on united.com – their search engine doesn’t even recognize LSE as a valid destination and tells me no flights exist.
Searching on aa.com – their search engine only returns 2-stop itineraries involving only their own flights.
Searching on some online travel agencies (Orbitz, AAA) – I thought this would be my best bet, because many years ago these travel sites would frequently offer these sorts of interline itineraries. But no luck this time, they only show me the same 2-stop itineraries on AA.

Is there some sort of advanced travel site where I can literally say “I want to fly SMF-ORD on UA flight 123 and connect onward to LSE on AA flight 456 and book this as a single ticket”? Or is this the sort of thing I need an old fashioned travel agent for?

44 posts - 14 participants