orbitmic

The bottom line is that 99.99% of people (including myself and all the people I work with from what I can see) fly from where they need to start to where they need to go unless they have a very specific reason to do otherwise (e.g. in my team we frequently organise to all fly on the same transatlantic to prepare our work together before connecting to our individual destinations). I would assume that people who go somewhere else to backtrack and get a cheaper fare or add unnecessary segments for mileage runs are an infinitesimal minority, most likely (almost) only found on Flyertalk and even then you'll find that it probably represents very few people.