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If your Distiller printer instance had its paper size set to 17x11, and you send both 8.5x11 and 17x11 pages in the same job to the printer, then Distiller will automatically crop the 8.5x11 pages and leave the 17x11 pages as is. So far so good.

But as far as I know the 8.5x11 pages are just cropped for display -- if you look at one of these pages in Acrobat and select the Crop tool, you'll see that the page has huge margins, it's still a 17x11 paper size, it's just that for display it's been automatically cropped to the "page" size (as distinct from the "paper" physical size).

Success after this point all depends on the print shop capabilities. If they print on the larger size paper they'll have to trim the smaller pages to fit -- lots of manual effort and time ($$) and wasted paper particularly when the larger pages are inserted in the middle of two sections of smaller pages. They might have a utility that can automatically separate out the two page sizes and send them to different printers; if so, that's great too. Or they could possibly set it up in some of the advanced interfaces on digital printers.

After this one is out the door you might want to find out how much prep work they actually had to do on the files, to see if creating your files in a different way might prove cost-effective.

Please let us know how it goes, will you?