Booking Class Z or C?
 

I have an international trip next week and noticed that the outbound booking class is Z, while the return is C.

My trade agent routinely finds Z fares and I've always thought Z was upgraded business using a SWU or Points but I've never had points of SWU's deducted.

Is this a consolidator or gray market travel agent? Normally Z is indeed upgrade inventory while C is a relatively expensive but not completely full fare business class bucket. My instinct would be to become very suspicious that the travel agent could be using illegally purchased miles. Can you see your exact fare codes or fare rules? Can you see your bookings and receipts (doubtful) on delta.dumb? How do the fares you pay compare to DL published fares for your routes, especially near the time of ticketing?

I'm assuming that these are tickets not using codeshares and written on DL stock, with ticket numbers starting in 006. Look at your booking on delta.dumb using both the PNR or booking code and the ticket number.

Note that for some othe airlines, such as UA and LH, Z is deeply discounted business class, including special sale fares.

I assume that this is not your corporate travel agent, who might well have special contracted fares, but those generally seem to book into normal inventory codes. What do you know about the travel agent and how did you discover them? Have you tried to do some obvious google
searches for problems, including BBB?

I have actually purchased Z fares on KLM operated flights so if the OP is flying KLM I see this as a very good possibility that it is just a deeply discounted Business Class ticket. If the OP is traveling on all DL flights, I have never seen a Z ticket that was not an upgrade with miles or SWUs. Would be curious to know the itinerary.

Yeah, if the intl part is on KLM then Z could make sense, since that is a valid fare bucket for discounted biz. However, if it is all DL metal or DL codeshare flight numbers, then Z doesn't make sense for a purchased fare class as mentioned in above posts.

This is our normal corporate travel agent. I can see the ticket information and receipt online, and also had it emailed to me from the Delta website. This is a large national corporate travel agency. I'm wondering if this is a discounted fare that is not normally available to the public. It looks like the z fare is about $1200 cheaper than the d.com published fare.

Is it an AF or KLM operated flight or codeshare?

have you been earning DL miles on these flights?

It's a Delta flight from MSP-LHR. I've always earned x1.5mqm on these flights.

So does your itinerary show the flight as DL40 or KL6000?

DL40

Can you pull up the ticket receipt info and see the booking fare class? It should be a link in your itinerary and will give more details than just the Z/C buckets.