travelnewbie

We tried booking a flight to Denver and everytime we clicked on final Purchase, we came to a window that pretty much jacked up our price. What is going on with Delta? consumers have pretty much been left to dry now that the lunatics are running the asylum (White House) but wow, so soon.

dr88

wrong forum though

Jaimito Cartero

This is a long running problem with Delta. Search for the same flights on an OTA (Orbitz, Priceline, etc) and see if you can purchase the ticket.

TerryK

Wrong forum.

This is a typical issue with married segment availability. Nothing new and nothing wrong. You tried to force a connection booking into two separate segments, DL system checked married segment availability and they are not available at your fare. Hence, booking was rejected and refared. It will work if your connection time at SLC is 4 hours or more.

poohfighter

I usually just call delta to get around this. I've never had a problem getting the phone agent to honor the fare.

davetravels

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...ore-money.html

xliioper

Looks like married segment logic to me. The SEA-SLC + SLC-DEN routing is a giveaway. There's X bucket on the individual flights, but not the through routing, so married segment takes over and prices based on SEA-DEN through fare bucket availability. I bet you won't be able to get the cheaper price on third party sites either. Sorry, I don't see the grand conspiracy here.

exwannabe

The problem is the friggen error message.

How about instead:

"We are sorry, but due to an IT problem the price we previously showed you is not available".

The "high demand" excuse is such obvious crap.

TerryK

Can DL phone agent override married segment availability?

xliioper

Revenue management sets the bucket availability. It's not up to an agent to override. There are separate buckets for SEA-SLC, SLC-DEN, and the SEA-DEN through fares. The bucket availability applies to the separate fares for each route only. As already stated, this standard industry practice and has been in place for many years. The X fare price OP is seeing is actually a single through fare, but there is no X fare bucket availability for the through fare, only for the fares on the individual flights. Note that purchasing the separate X fares on the individual segments will not result in any savings here (price it out for yourself if you don't believe me).

davetravels

You're right about that! . . . .

weetanuki

I had a similar thing happen last year. Called in Medallion line, and the agent said she got the same cheaper price and then the same message. She somehow got them to issue the ticket at the lower price. I dunno how often they do this, but HUCA to see?

ty97

When in doubt, go with IT error.

TBH, this happened *all the time* on AA when using Google Flights. I haven't seen it nearly as much on DL, though it has happened.

xliioper

Both Google Flights and delta.com give the right fare when you do a one-way search from SEA-DEN -- namely a $204.80 K fare (KAUOA0MC). It's specifically when you do a multi-city search (which I'm guessing what OP is doing) and force the routing when they get confused and initially offer up an $86.80 X fare (XAUNA0MC) even though there is no X bucket inventory on the through routing. So, basically, there is a bug in both Delta.com's and Google's multi-city searches in that they seem to only be looking at the individual flight bucket inventory rather than the through flight bucket inventory when quoting the fare. Since you are getting a through fare, it's the through fare inventory bucket availability that matters, not the individual flight bucket inventory -- which only applies to fares filed for the individual flights. Unfortunately, it doesn't correctly check the bucket inventory until you attempt to purchase. Yes, I think it's fair to classify this as an IT bug. But, no, it's not some conspiracy or intentional "bait and switch". Also, Google Flights suffers from the exact same bug. I believe that Google Flights and Delta's search share the same software lineage from ITA Software, so it's not too surprising they both share the same bug (which also exhibits on ITA Matrix). I tried multi-city search on Kayak, Orbitz, Priceline, et. al. and they did not quote the bogus XAUNA0MC fare. So clearly not all searches suffer from the bug.

travelnewbie

I tried it with other cities (instead of SLC and it still gives the same message), interesting though to see that. We called Delta and the rep was pretty much clueless. She initially got the wrong dates, took all our info, and then realized her mistake. Waste of time. We went with United.