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I saw this question regarding trying to book multiple people in different classes, but I was wondering whether it's possible for one person to book a mixed ticket on a single itinerary.

As a particular example, I'm probably going to be flying from the U.S. to Cebu, Philippines next summer. Since no U.S. airlines fly to Cebu and no airlines that fly to Cebu fly to my home airport, I'm considering the following route:

Delta: BNA->DTW->ICN Korean Air: ICN->CEB

Korean Air: CEB->ICN Delta: ICN->DTW->BNA

I'm wondering whether it's possible to book a single ticket with Business class (i.e. BusinessElite/Delta One) on the Delta portion and economy on the Korean Air portion.

The ticketing carrier would ideally be Delta in this case.

I definitely would want my bags checked all the way through from Nashville to Cebu and also want to make sure that I'm protected from losing my booking on one airline in the event that a previous flight on the other airline got delayed. However, I'd rather not pay the extra $1,000 to upgrade the ICN->CEB->ICN portion on Korean Air if it can be avoided. The lie-flat bed seats would definitely be nice on the DTW->ICN leg, but it's not really worth the extra cost on the relatively short hop from Seoul to Cebu and back in my case, especially since the difference in comfort between economy and business seats is dramatically less on Korean Air than it is on Delta.

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  • Of course it's possible! People do it every day! Not every booking interface will offer it mind you, but it's certainly possible when using the right interface / website / phoning someone
    – Gagravarr
    Dec 12, 2014 at 8:09

1 Answer 1

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Yes, it's entirely possible, and since Delta and Korean are both in Skyteam the itinerary is quite feasible. However...

  • Tickets like these are usually impossible to book online, you will need to book this directly with the airline or a travel agent. (Update: There are exceptions, and Delta appears to be one of them!)
  • While price difference between economy and business for ICN-CEB alone may well be $1000, if you're travelling all of BNA-DTW-ICN in business class, the cost difference for upgrading the final ICN-DEB leg as well is likely to be lot less than that. Due to the way fare pricing works, regional flights attached to long-hauls are often close to free, occasionally even cheaper than a flight terminating at the hub.
  • For trips where you only want to upgrade a few segments, buying the whole trip in economy and using miles to upgrade can be very cost effective.
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  • Not only is it possible to book such flights online, but it's the default/only search mode on delta.com.
    – Flimzy
    Dec 12, 2014 at 12:16
  • @Flimzy I should have remembered that, since I asked about this a while back myself! Updated. travel.stackexchange.com/questions/34243/…
    – lambshaanxy
    Dec 12, 2014 at 12:55
  • As far as I know, Delta.com will not allow me to purchase this itinerary, even without the class difference. At least every time I've checked in the past (I've been to Cebu a couple of other times recently,) Delta.com didn't even allow you to select Cebu as a destination. They don't have a codeshare with KE on that route. As far as the price difference, I haven't talked to Delta directly, yet, but when I priced the business-class round-trip with ITA Matrix, the total price was equal to the price of purchasing the two business class tickets separately (which did admittedly seem odd.)
    – reirab
    Dec 12, 2014 at 15:04
  • As far as the linked question, I saw that one before, but it claims that screenshot is from Kayak, not Delta.com. Having said that, it doesn't look like the interface I get when I go to either site. On Delta.com itself, I've never noticed an option to select different classes within the same itinerary before. Even when I attempted (just now) to select a business/first fare for a return trip after having selected economy for the outbound, it automatically changed them both to business/first.
    – reirab
    Dec 12, 2014 at 15:15
  • @reirab as a frequent kayak user / player (I spend way too many hours on it), it's definitely kayak. When you get a search result set, you can click on a flight to see details of the legs, and that's when it expands to look like the screenshot.
    – Mark Mayo
    Dec 13, 2014 at 1:12

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