Saw this last night at approx. $800 last night when looking for flights via ITA Matrix-- wasn't trying for a PS fare, but it was interesting and I don't seem to be able to replicate.

Is there a engine where we can force a higher fare class outbound not return, etc, or some other way to find this again? TIA Ken.

Just glance down the fare chart, glancing through 'details' until you find R fares on the DL-metal 350s. Hope Delta honors this-- looks like it may be an error.

UPDATE: it's an error, these fares are unbookable on DL.com-- you'll get a message on purchase that they are sold out; reading the rare fules makes it clear they are not intented to be PS.

Can always try on something like Expedia. I've had trouble recent booking with DL when the arriving/departing airports aren't same. Ie arriving ZAG and departing SOF as in OP or departing say ORD but instead returning to MSP. I had one SFO-AMS-JNB and JNB-AMS-LAX. Agents couldn't get to book and dl.com kept erroring out. Even global support couldn't get it to ticket, though agreed it should. Finally on a lurk, tried on Expedia. Ticketed just fine.

Now that's funny. "If not bookable on DL.com it's an error fare".

Thanks for the chuckle.
Yes, Expedia does work work when others don't. Maybe Delta should hire some Expedia IT guys.

Different incentives. Expedia has incentives to find and ticket the cheapest possible fares to customers. Delta has the incentive to maximize revenue from fare sales. It is not surprising that delta.com breaks on fares that - while perhaps are legal tickets - may contradict this objective because they are unintended fare combinations.

These are perfectly normal tickets and fare combinations . It's just that the Delta booking system for the last year I've found is c***py for non-straighy forward tickets.

Yes, I know they're perfectly normal/legal tickets. But Delta isn't exactly super stoked about advertising and ticketing those flights on their own site. It's harder to do revenue management on complex itineraries as opposed to a simpler ones.

In my example SFO/JNB/LAX. RM is done the same for both portions. The fare code was even the same regardless of SFO or LAX. Global ticketing even contacted RM the 1st time I had the issue to verify there was no issue. There was no issue there. Muchless the issue was they couldn't even get it to manually ticket. It just kept throwing it out. Everything was perfectly fine as far as RM/fare rules. It would price out perfectly fine. Just DL IT refused to issue the ticket, even manually entered.

Thank you sirs/madams. I'll try again.

My quite refutable presumption here was that the underlying R fare was not PS because when you read the fare rules on ITA it says it's Economy. Is that correct or not?

R is definitely deep discount economy for KL marketed flights. Sure looks like a fare or filing error. DL uses R for FC/PE award bookings. Note that ITA is not perfect. It still messes up on married segment bucket availability when you use the multi-city search feature (it will incorrectly quote fares based on individual flight bucket availability rather than looking at married segment availability when multiple segments are involved on a single fare).

Yep. The above looks like an error/mistake/incorrect quote that then is treated incorrectly when ITA is pushed over to DL.com via PowerTools.

Alas-- I'm not seeing a way to split a PS fare with an economy fare, which in my situaiton, would be quite fine; using PS on the outbound is forcing me to use a W on the inbound, when I'm 92.5% or so likely to get that via upgrade.

I had an issue similar to yours where not only did it put the R segment into PS, but the connection JFK-LAX was showing "First Class (R)" too.

I booked one and it changed to Main Cabin on My Trips. Contacted DL and it took awhile to get someone who understood what was happening.

They did their best and told me to write in - either via DL email or DOT - to get the 75% refund or reroute onto real PS.

This is a multi billion dollar company and their IT has ti be better than this. Idgaf if they are losing some money here because they started this mess with so many service options and then starting E fares while KL.and AF don't use E...for a JV they need to step it up

Agreed. This is self-imposed complexity - which is fine, but if they are going to create complexity, they need to be able to manage it.

Exactly. Not even self-imposed complexity - just self-imposed attempts at trying to increase revenue.

Again, that's fine, but they need to stand by what they sold. If they sell something as "Delta Premium Select" then try to use the fare class letter or fare rules to try to wiggle out of it - completely unacceptable.

The "common traveler" can barely understand all the other complexities of the airlines; if something says "Delta Premium Select" or "First Class" - even if they screwed up the booking code - they should honor it.

I haven't decided whether I feel like writing in to DL to get the Premium Select, or take the 75% downgrade refund (as I'm not in "Main Cabin" and not "Delta Premium Select" - it doesn't even just say "Premium Economy" or anything, but very specifically "Delta Premium Select" which is a product with heavy marketing around those 3 words.

Exactly how long is that supposed to take?