I'm 1K if it matters.

Mrs. Milepig and I are flying ORD-KEF via EWR many months from now in J.

Even though all the flights are wide open at this point, for some reason only a flight with a 10 hour layover at EWR has D available others are showing higher buckets.

I'd just eat the difference, but for the two of us it comes to $1,000 more!!

Since all the options put us onto the same EWR/KEF flight (no surprise, there is only the one!) I assume this is ORD/KEF market driven and for some reason UA has only opened up D for that one flight combination.

When I check ORD/EWR the flights are all the same price (within a few dollars) all in Z or P. So there's something about the ORD/EWR/KEF combo that is causing this.

Will a sympathetic agent be able/willing to do an exception and get us onto one of those later flights for ORD/EWR that have the exact same price when booked separately?

Adding: I just priced it out making ORD-EWR and EWR-KEF separate legs, and the fare class for ORD-EWR changed to C giving me the higher price for all the options.