Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
Now I'm confused because I was always told that EF doesn't check for married segment logic when showing availability.
For the OP, usually you must play around with the departure times to see all of the flight possibilities for the day. [I wish there were a way to make EF show all of the nonstop DL flights on a route instead of showing a nonstop or two and a bunch of connections.]
ITA correctly checks for married segment availability when using one-way or roundtrip searches. It is ONLY when using the multi-city search feature that it does not actually check married segment availability when combining multiple segments on a single fare. The delta.com multi-city search previously suffered from the same issue. DL addressed it by simply disabling the function to combine multiple flights on a single fare when using multi-city search. It now only prices out each segment on a separate fare when using multi-city search. This will frequently not produce the lowest possible price in cases where segments can be combined on a single fare, but it will also not produce erroneous fare quotes like the ITA multi-city search does. The reason you are able to initially pull up the fare quotes on delta.com with bookwithmatrix and other sites is that delta.com does not do an inventory check at that point. It will simply pull up whatever fares it is directed to pull up via the API interface. It is only when you go to purchase the fares that it actually does an inventory check and discovers there is no inventory in the quoted fare bucket class.