Originally Posted by
melrowgo
Thanks jackal. I had tried a similar test just to see if that would work for a particular airport before posting, but I couldn't figure out how to do it for a whole country (e.g. the US). If this isn't a possible option, I suppose I could negate all of the likely cities one would travel through in the US en route to HKG. I'm thinking that would include LAX, DFW, SFO and maybe PHX, HNL, DEN.
I doubt ITA even knows what a "country" is. It probably knows airport codes and nothing else. I've never seen any reference to being able to specify a country in the routing language.
Are you looking for a particular airline? If so, you can specifically search for flights on, say, UA and then you'd only have to exclude cities that UA flies to HKG from (SFO, ORD, and EWR, I believe?) and you wouldn't have to bother excluding other cities like PHX, DFW, etc. as UA doesn't fly to HKG from those cities.