I think the allowability of this is governed by the stopover rules for the award, as that's what you're essentially doing. I've always been a big fan of stopovers, on the "Why see just one place when you can see two?" theory.

On Delta it depends on whether the intermediate city (CHI in this case) is on the "routing." It used to be you could check which places were by going into the "valid connecting cities" sub-screen on easySABRE. That was a very valuable tool.

Delta tends to allow a lot of places on trans-con trips and not just their hub cities (making it very unusual in that regard), but CHI may be considered too much of a diversion for MCO-LAS. On AA you could likely do it because CHI was a hub (i.e. there was a dog-leg but they didn't have to force a connection in a non-hub city).

On DL I've gotten them to force a connection in a non-hub city so that I can take a stopover before (e.g. MCI on an ATL-LAS trip). Very important to do your homework and propose something specific in cases like that, though. Most airlines allow stopovers in a very miserly way (and usually not at all domestically), and I'd hate to see DL become like CO and NW in that regard.

[This message has been edited by RustyC (edited Dec 31, 2003).]