pruss2ny

Newish to delta and noticing when i am booking PDX/JAX the website defaults to 6 options thru ATL. I know from playing with multi-city that there are other routing options if I am willing to accept another leg (ie pdx-slc-atl-jax)...these other options open up access to different aircraft plus potential for different pricing, but i can't seem to find them UNLESS i go to multi-city OR search award travel -- but then then routing disappears when I go back to $$

Is there a way to set a preference that allows Delta.com to show more options to a flight search than simple the most direct?

Zorak

Not that I recall. For situations like this I generally use ITA Matrix -> the userscript for booking (or bookwithmatrix)

ITA Software Matrix Airfare Search Consolidated Information and Help Thread

ITA-Matrix-PowerTools - Userscript for Orbitz/DL/UA/AA/BA/CZ/IB/LA/LH/LX/TK

BookWithMatrix.com: a tool to easily book with ITA Matrix

xliioper

As noted above, ITA Matrix is probably the most powerful fare search tool and will show many possible options if you specify DL+ as the carrier in the advanced search options. Beware using ITA Matrix multi-city search it will sometimes combine segments and show single fare options where married segment availability does not actually exist on the segments (and thus the fares will not actually be bookable). ITA one-way and roundtrip searches do not have this issue and will only show fares for which there is available inventory on married segments.

DL had disabled combining segments on a single fare with multi-city search for awhile as it suffered from same issue. It looks like they have re-enabled the function, but not sure if it still has same bugs.

To answer my own question, it's still fudged. Showing single U fare here when only Q bucket exists on married segments, so you can't actually purchase this (it will bomb out once it checks married segment inventory at purchase).

MSPeconomist

Are connections other than just ATL legal routings? Have you tried to check the fare rules for this?

If not, you should be able to purchase tickets from DL using multi trip/broken fares, but the time at each "illegal" connection point would need to exceed four hours for multi trip to work.

xliioper

DL PDX-JAX fares allow a number double-connect routing options. Here are ones involving ATL connections -- PDX-SLC/SEA/MSP/LAX/DTT/CVG-ATL-JAX. Of course, some of these flights no longer exist (like PDX-CVG) or are currently not being flown (like PDX-DTW) and are thus not relevant and cannot be booked on a single fare. And just because the routing is allowed, doesn't mean you will find married segment inventory in the cheaper fare buckets (generally speaking, they'd rather you'd take the single connect and thus often limited married segment inventory in the double connect routings). In some cases, a broken fare will be cheaper than a single fare due to this. However, DL will require a layover of over 6 hours (up from pre-Covid 4 hours for domestic) in order to book broken fares through hubs where there are valid single fare routings.

pruss2ny

Thx for all the replies..fwiw my motivation is not to game any systems so much as take advantage of nicer cabins that fly slc/atl v pdx/atl (767 v 737)...the extra stop may seem annoying but given my history of 300k/mi annually of domestic travel, i’ve made my peace w occasional stops en route