Thanks all for the guidance, couple of good options that I will try to guide our travel agents to! According to policy it has to be Delta coded flights.

Appreciate your insights to the Delta network, I'm hopeful to see the price the ICN option on KE- I have flown via ICN before and it's a decent airport to transit through.

LAX to Guangzhou is also a good option for me as our office is in Guangzhou. I'll be flying 2nd week of March. I'll check back in on the final outcome after working with travel again. Brain trust that they are, they want me to wait to book only 4 weeks out. IME, that usually means more money.