I believe that AY never really saw themselves as operating intercontinental-to-intercontinental connections (NA-Asia). They do primarily Intercontinental to continental-europe connections and those are extremely well optimized. You can arrive on any longhaul and connect to any shorthaul very very efficiently.
I guess, when scheduling those short connections, they didn't consider (or it just wasn't possible) optimizing longhaul-to-longhaul at the same time.

While Finnair have been flying to New York since 1969, I guess before the atlantic joint venture they were just a quaint little airline some people in NA might have heard of, but wouldn't consider flying anyway. Now, Finnair is part of this joint operations and suddenly turns up in a lot of peoples flight searches. I guess it is only natural there is a new interest in using Finnair in a new way.

Should Finnair offer a hotel for those odd (odd in view of their strategy) connections with long layovers?
Currently, Finnair NA activity is a bit higher than normal (they are surprisingly moving capacity from the asian routes to NA, despite their re-affirmed business plan of serving shortest route Asia-Europe).
But remember that it still is only JFK that is daily and year-around. All other NA destinations are seasonal and only a few flights a week.

IMHO that is a bit of the hobbyist aproach - they moved some capacity to capture some money, but it is not a strategic shift. And as such they won't gamble any money. They won't spend more to get more, ie there will be no layover hotel program.


The situation might also be quite different in the near future when new A350s comes in to the fleet. For one, they are at the limits of their current connection-strategy at HEL airport. Almost all flights arrive and depart within 2 very narrow time bands (they call banks) - one in the early morning, one in the afternoon. At these banks, HEL is runing at max capacity. So with new capacity coming in there is an inevitable change in schedules.


If Finnair adds capacity to NA adding daily flights year-around (again, in contrast to their current strategy) there is potential in NA-India and NA-Middle East, and perhaps a few other places in near and far east. Can't really se Finnair being competitive on NA-Japan though, regardless of stopover service.