Originally Posted by
xliioper
LAX is a legal routing for for DTW-SEA fares (the DTW-LAX seat upgrade offer above is part of DTW-LAX-SEA itin on a single fare). But that fact does not change pricing on DTW-LAX online seat upgrade offers. As you can see below, you can get Z fares on DTW-SEA fare with LAX routing for as low as $283 (vs. $648.48 on a DTW-LAX standalone fare). The $283 price is $10 more than $273 price on DTW-SEA non-stop above due to additional taxes (but is exact same Z fare filing).
Other way around - if you want to go to LAX, I was saying you could route DTW-SEA-LAX and buy upsells on each segment for less than the fare difference on the DTW-LAX table (because SEA is so depressed from the AS fare war, normally this wouldn't be cheaper).
However, it looks like DTW-LAX must be nonstop from the one fare I pulled.
For all I know, a fare break in SEA is cheaper than nonstop, although Delta makes it outrageously difficult to book fare breaks.
Originally Posted by
xliioper
Note that upfare pricing includes additional 7.5% Excise tax on fare difference (so base fare differential is actually $93.02 which is Delta's cut on $100 price difference). Online seat upgrade offer on non-stop DTW-SEA is close to the fare differential at $99 base, but is not actually a fare differential as there is no fare exchange involved. DL could have chosen a base amount on seat upgrades so that total with tax works out to an even dollar amount like upfares do. For whatever reason, they chose to not do that (instead all the seat upgrade offer pricing looks to have base price amount in whole dollars that ends in a 9).
Right, the upsell seems like it is
supposed to be the same as the fare differential, but it's 7.5% higher. This seems like it is an error on Delta's part, but who knows.