Q. I recently found a great fare on Continental for my summer vacation, but got an error message saying to try again later whenever I tried to purchase it. I tried several times before finally called Continental. The operator informed me that since the flight I was trying to book was actually a Delta code share flight and that Delta only updates the Continental database once a day that there was no way for Continental to actually see if there are seats available on the flight and they were unable process the transaction. I could book a Continental flight which was about $200 more expensive. And yet on Delta's website, the flight I wanted was listed at about $100 more than the original flight I found on Continental's site. Seems like a mess to me.

Any ideas on how to actually get this flight?

A. Most likely you could have booked it on Travelocity or Orbitz . You may not see the words "codeshare" next to the flight, but if you dig deeper you'll see what's up. Meanwhile, Orbitz pretty clearly shows codeshare flights, listing both airlines side by side.