Delta has created a monster with their new easy to use reservation system. In addition to not finding the schedule you want, it is full of bugs that make it almost impossible to find the best balance between flight times and fare.

If you search for the cheapest flights, the fares offered may be the lowest, but many flights do not appear on the list at all. Ok, perhaps the LUT fares are gone for these unlisted flights so you do a search using discounted versus deeply discounted and you find you flight. Unfortunately, it is a B fare and the price goes from $500 to $1300. So how to find those K fares so you can get a better departure time. How to find those flights I had taken in the past at a reasonable but not cheapest price?

So I tried using multi-city. Using multi-city checked to search for price produces a nice display with a lot of information. The display lists departure times and the lowest fare associated with that departure and the other cheapest segments. Kind of nice. So I input leaving anytime. The resultant departure times I get are 745am, 925am, or 1043am. No mention of the five later flights. The fare is $533. Unfortunately, for the ATL-LAS leg it only list departures at 533pm, 658pm, or 759pm. Is this a stopover or a connection? Oh, the fare has gone up to $588 using any of the three selections offered. This works better if you specify a departure time. The apparent godsend of specifying anytime is almost useless when using price as a determinant.

So instead I tried using multi-city with schedule rather than price checked. Specified an anytime departure and while I got more, I didn’t get all the flights available. Worse still there is no cost estimate even an inaccurate one like I got above. So, trying to see what the lowest fares were I scheduled a red eye overnight return. Upon selecting the segments, the program blew up when trying to select the final next day early morning segment. The program was listing the early morning connections for the date of the late night departure not those for the next day so all the selection bars were grayed out. It cannot handle multi-day flights.

Bottom line there is no easy way to find a flight that while it might not be cheapest, offers the best compromise between time and price. I was hoping this system would when checked anytime offer all available departures and the associated price range or at least lowest price. Then the next associated lowest price as one navigates through the segments. That way you could choose the most desirable cost/time combination. And be sure to note that anytime here is of almost no help at all.