Originally Posted by
Aviatrix
Though more recently FR seems to have started services to airports that it refers to by their real names - for example, there seems to have been no attempt to market services to "Hamburg Bremen" despite the fact that Bremen and Lübeck are equidistant from Hamburg.
IIRC, they were asked by the OFT a few years back to drop some names when the name of the main city was not in the official name of the airport and the airport is quite distant from said main city. So out went things like Lyon (St Etienne) (they no longer fly there), and the like. That said, they have reverted back to type since then in relation to quite a few destinations, such as Barcelona (Girona), Barcelone (Reus), Grenoble Lyon, Bratislava (Vienna), etc...
And then, there are also the airports where they can quite legitimately use the name of the main city because it is in the name of the airport. Bruxelles (Charleroi) and Frankfurt (Hahn) are the most striking examples of this.