Originally Posted by
xliioper
The published fares for these routes will almost always require flying one of the non-stop flights, but delta.com will frequently display broken fare connecting options (which will almost always cost more than the non-stop options on a single fare because of the separate fares involved) to provide additional alternatives.
My experience has been that delta.com does not return broken fare connections. For instance, a dummy booking RIC-LGA will only return direct flights because the routing rules for every fare require non-stop. However, RIC-BOS will return non-stop and 1-stop fares, but since only T fares and higher allow a 1-stop routing, those fares will be more expensive that the V and X fares which require direct flights.