Mixed cabin through pricing?
 

Maybe I've been ignorant all along. I had always relied on 'mixed cabin' when the short haul domestic segment had only coach available while the long haul trans-ocean segment did have business available.

But it seems Delta is pricing them as two flights.

Here is a random example. On 8/17/2017, Delta has the following available for the saver level. I know this as Alaska is showing them.

7:05a MSP->SEA Delta 1473 Coach available
3:27p SEA->PVG Delta 589 Business available

Now, Delta doesn't have an award chart but I know for Saver, they charge 80,000 miles for US->China.

However, this is showing up as 105,000 for the two flights shown above. It seems the system is pricing them as 80k+25k.

I had the platinum line try to have someone manually price it. It came back with the same results, although I didn't know how much effort was spent on actually checking it manually.

Is this new, or been going on for a while?

UPDATE: on my 2nd try, I was able to find an agent that overrode it for me. She said it was an exception with supervisor approval. And based on the time she had to work with the reissue desk, it certainly felt like an uphill battle. Great service from her, good for me with a happy ending. But as a practice to penalize members like this without any obvious benefit that I can see? It's Delta so I guess I shouldn't be surprised...

SkyMiles pricing has changed since about a year ago. "Levels" are no more. The system pricing things out as it wishes. You have no visibility. Mixed buckets price out as two one-ways. All-in-low mix-class (so O and X) sometimes price out as one ticket, sometimes two. According to some phantom posters there are further sub buckets (like X_1, X_2) which we can't see.

Did you search it as multi-city? That forces the fare to break now.

No. You are right - before we could use multi-city to force mixed cabin. No longer unless you want to pay more miles, which defeats the purpose.

Now to price out mixed cabin, the only way I knew is over the phone. But I am not getting many good results, until this morning with the heroic effort on the agent's part to help me.

If the agents search it as multi-city, it does the same thing.

...which goes back to my point: if there is no reliable way to price it out 'correctly', I would consider it dead in my book.