Originally Posted by
therossinator
I would be surprised if the price for rates booked through DTS/SATO are different if fared separately or together. City-pair rates are contracted prices no matter what the other legs in the itinerary are.
I've had this happen when a stop is involved. It's the same result you sometimes get with hidden-city ticketing. For example, a few years ago IAD-ICN (via NRT) was a lower contract amount than IAD-NRT. Saved the government about $700 by flying to ICN with a stop in NRT.
Originally Posted by
therossinator
An interesting asside is that when I book the island hopper, I can pick a different seat for each segment. If I do this, I will be CPU elegable on each segment. If I pick the same seat for all segments in one direction, it will get lumped into a single flight where my chances of a CPU clearing is significantly lower. I assume that there are some behind the scenes operations that this is a clue about.
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Not sure if this is the same behavior, but on "direct" flights with the same flight number on two legs with a stop seat assignments can be a mess because UA often prevented selecting a seat on the second leg and it becomes more difficult to get upgrades (confronted this on SIN-NRT-IAD (804 and 803 in reverse)) where a GPU would have to clear both legs to clear unless you separated the segments.