Originally Posted by
ATOBTTR
You can book it as a Multi-City on one ticket. You can also book this as two separate one-ways. The advantage to the latter option is that if the price for one segment changes (drops), you can rebook that segment and get the difference back as an e-credit where is if it's all one ticket as a multi-city, you would have to reprice the whole ticket for any change. DL will protect you on back-to-back separate tickets in the event of IROPS and will even through-check bags across separate tickets when it's DL to DL (or DL to a handful of select partners).
The disadvantage to booking as separate tickets is with respect to schedule changes as a switch on one ticket will mean also having to change the other. IROPS may also get a little more complicated (though not overly so) because an agent will have to make adjustments to two tickets versus one.
ETA: I see your recent post where you said this trip is in January. There is a good chance of schedule changes between now and then so I may recommend booking as a multi-city on one ticket. Then DL can more easily treat this as ILM-MSY and if there are schedule changes, just rebook it as ILM-MSY, particularly if segments are added or changed to make for a true connection in DTW.
Hmm. I was seeing it the opposite way: I suspect that, if I book ELM-DTW-MSY on one ticket and there is a schedule change, Delta's IT would automatically change the booking to either the early-morning one stop, or a two-stop via ATL -- that is, the options that show up in an ordinary schedule search -- even if the schedule change is minor and doesn't affect the feasibility of the routing. DL has said that ELM would get an additional DTW frequency, but it's not in the schedule and I doubt that they have the resources to do it.
Is there any chance at all, for ELM-DTW and DTW-MSY on separate tickets, that an agent would refuse to check a bag to MSY? I don't know whether Delta ground service at ELM is staffed by Delta employees, Skywest employees, or someone else.