Originally Posted by
canadiancow
Correlation is not causation.
The one that I recall is that YXE-YWG-YQR used to be a valid route.
But outside of EYW, who in their right mind would fly that? It's not like it was priced at a level that made sense even for a MR.
You're not going to run a promotion like this in order to change the routing rules for fares that would only be used for the promotion. You could just not run the promotion and you'd be in the same place.
Even discussing pricing... it's stupid to look at EYW flyers to draw any conclusions, because it doesn't represent real travel. I'll pay $500 to fly YCD-YVR-YYJ during EYW, but if I actually needed to make that trip, I'm not even convinced it would make sense to pay $5 to fly it. It just takes too much time compared to driving.
Off the top of my head, the only reasonable data I could see them gathering would be for MCT, since that's a number that behaves the same for real travel, but we're really pushing it to its limit. If I keep missing valid MCT connections, it probably needs to be raised. If I make every connection, they could experiment with dropping it a few minutes.
Sorry to break it to you buddy, but your YXE-YWG-YQR is a small fish and the least of AC's concerns, although they still shut down that routing anyhow. They had way bigger fish to fry, which they did.
After EYW5, some learned not to poke the bear and stopped exploiting extreme routing rules during EYW contests. In fact, there aren't too many of those left to be exploited anyway.
You and whoever end up in the top 10 or even top 20 this year likely never flew the extreme routings I referred to, whether this year or in years past. None of your itineraries would be flown by average fliers outside of EYW contests.