A travel agent once told me that she felt as if airlines set their fares by using a dartboard. That's how hard it is to figure out why airline pricing works the way it does. I once went to the Canada forum to ask a question on behalf of some friends who were going to join a study tour to Nunavut. They were appalled at the airfare, even out of Winnipeg, and the Canada forum assured me that these fares were the normal ones, even though, or especially because, people up there are dependent on air travel.

As an example of weird pricing, on one of my Minneapolis to Tokyo trips, a DL search brought up a cheap ticket, but it would have required going MSP>SEA>JFK>NRT. It was cheaper than either MSP>SEA>NRT or MSP>JFK>NRT. Go figure. I decided to take a more sensible routing via LAX.

Over the years, I have found that flying out of LAX gives me the cheapest trans-Pacific fares, cheap enough that I can fly MSP>LAX on whichever airline offers the best schedule and fare, spend the night near LAX, and take one of the Asian airlines (or UA in a pinch) for about $400 less than it would cost to fly nonstop on Delta. Or maybe the best rate is flying out of LAX and back into SFO. It makes no sense, and you just have to keep checking back.