Originally Posted by kv99

just all about the distribution and marketing.

to be fair one advantage for fliers is that it can save some taxes for the consumer, and while you earn less miles typically as it uses Great Circle routing between the O & D, it can also save miles when doing things like RTW tickets.

what i find odd is the choices airlines make about where to use this... for example, US markets US728/729 currently BOS-PHL-LHR vv. this just seems stupid to me given how few people would ever take this service, and if they booked it without realising that it goes through PHL would be incredibly irritated and never want to fly US again!! why not use it to connect cities that don't currently have nonstop service but do have large flows? i'm making this up but STL-LHR might be a reasonable example.