Originally Posted by
ms294
I found exactly this and it drives me up the wall. As does the fact that the website simply ignores any non-stop versus 1-stop/2-stop preferences, as well as the preferred departure time etc. etc.. Really this is not difficult programming.
I also found that searching by price on a LHR-LAX-IAD-LHR itinerary quite happily returned a B-fare, but searching by schedule changed some (or all) of the legs to S fares. It seemed pretty random.
I have this problem A LOT with LAX-LHR (with potential stops in between). I do LAX-LHR-LAX once a month and it's been at least 6 months since I've been able to get a B fare RT on this route to come up on .bomb. Putting [DEN|ORD|IAD] in the middle sometimes helps but sometimes not.
Not that I've minded the few extra miles doing it via DEN (and I once even ended up on the new-config 777 which was nice) or ORD (and getting a much improved sleep on the 767 new C).
But the couple times I've needed to do the non-stop, yes, I definitely had to call to get it done.