Originally Posted by
Often1
It's far from arbitrary. It is expressly designed to stop people from searching for cheap(er) routings and then changing those cheap tickets to what they wanted in the first place. All DL is doing here is selling you the new ticket for what it would sell the same ticket to anybody else.
As to not cancelling the remainder of the ticket if you noshow for one segment, that won't work. Period. The system auto cancels. That too is pretty universal. Only place where you can make that not happen is on tickets purchased in Germany, but those tickets are eye-poppingly expensive.
Exactly. If there was no reprice prior to travel and I knew I was going to have to fly from MSP to XXX around the first week of October for $350 I'd book it now, and just wait until my travel dates firmed up in late September, pay the $200 change fee and get the flight I wanted for $550 instead of the $800 DL is charging if I had just booked the ticket now. And that is a relatively mild example. Now imagine a TATL Z fare that requires 90+ days Advanced Purchase that's changed 2 days before when it would be a J/D fare.