I recently got a list of published fares for the route Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) / Maputo (ex-Lourenço Marques, Mozambique) from Travelocity (Sabre). It turns out that Iberia, British Airways, Air France, and KLM publish fares for that route. None of these companies actually have flights between South America and Southern Africa. South African Airways, Aerolineas Argentinas, Qantas, and Malaysian do not publish fares for the route, although they do operate flights such as São Paulo / Johannesburg, Buenos Aires / Cape Town, etc. Since I saw the published fares I innocently contacted British Airways and asked for a reservation. The agent I first spoke to knew nothing about the fare, but after a while he got a supervisor on the line who told me that although the Rio / Maputo fare exists, the actual mileage exceeds the allowed limit because the British Airways routing would have to go through London. So my question is … why do airlines publish fares that cannot be used to issue tickets on their own routes? Why bother? And why do the airlines that actually fly similar routes refrain from publishing fares? When I called up South African on the phone they were more than happy to make reservations and sell me a ticket, and at a fare lower than the published ones. Does anyone understand what's going on?