Originally Posted by
comet2404
Thanks for the replies everyone! This is still rather new to me. I'm a corporate pilot, and my company buys my tickets to and from work. I was with the airlines for 8 years, so I've always been able to jumpseat and non-rev anywhere I wanted to go. I've only had to worry about this stuff for the past two years.
The routing does seem to be the issue. I had two agents tell me since it was a nonstop IAD-ATL ticket, the SDC flight ALSO had to be a nonstop. I said that wasn't true, and I can most certainly add a connection (I don't think you can turn a connection into a nonstop though), and I asked her to send me through MSP or JFK just to get the point across to her. She wanted to charge me a $200 change fee and a difference in fare! They tell me what I want to do is against the rules, however when I ask them specifically which rule is broken, I'm just told what I want to do isn't allowed. I call BS considering it was just done two weeks ago.
If they want to have all these convoluted rules and fares, I expect the agents to know them, particularly if they expect me to know them.
So I suppose the proper question seems to be what constitutes a "valid" routing? And what is the easiest way for us to determine that?
Valid routings for a fare can be found on Experflyer. FYI, all currently published fares for IAD-ATL require non-stop routings, so adding a connection is in fact prohibited by these fares. As others have already indicated, you just got very lucky on your first trip and the agent simply ignored the routing rules on your fare.
PUBLISHED RTG WAS-ATL/DL501 /TAR-DRG1 EF-27OCT17 DIS-INDEF
TRAVEL MUST BE NONSTOP OR DIRECT
You can mostly divine valid routings by simply doing a fare search on delta.com and see which routings are offered as a single fare. The fact that a fare search on IAD-ATL shows only single fares for the non-stop routings (all options that involve a connection show broken fare combinations that consist of multiple fares) is a pretty strong indication that the published fares on this route do not permit connections. In some cases, the cheapest fares will require non-stop routings, while the more expensive fares permit connections. Below is an example of a search for DTW-MIA. You can see that the cheapest fares are only offered on the non-stop routing (V fares), while the options that have connections are still a single fare, they are a higher fare class (U fares). A search on ExpertFlyer verifies that V/X/T fares require non-stop routing for the route and only U or higher fares permit connections.