Originally Posted by BigFlyer

Pretty much every airline when you type in the URL of the home page looks at your IP address and sends you to the geographically (and sometimes linguistically) appropriate site. For example klm.com does this. But not Air France.

If you are in the US and type in airfance.com it directs you to a page entirely in French which lists Air France websites by continent and country. If you scroll about half-way down the cluttered page, there it is - États-Unis. Of course everyone in America would understand that to mean United States.

Of course if you know what you are doing you can go directly to airfrace.us.

I assume it would be trivial to send traffic to the correct website based on IP address,and I have to think that Air France loses some business (not much) because of this unusual setup.

Why do they do this?