I didn’t check any baggage, but at the Transit desk they asked me whether I did. I imagine that they have a procedure in case you do have bags to pick up.

here’s the full routing rules. You can certainly do ALG-BOS-JFK

I still see LAX routings. For me, momondo or simar aggregators work best. Not all OTAs can sell this fare, let alone price it. Also, many tools arent pricing LAX routing correctly despite ear routing rules. It’s odd, as if some human doing coding said “they couldnt have meant that”. For example, ITA will pull this fare up but cant seem to route it via LAX.

The reason that many people can’t find availability for this fare is that Iberia definitely does married segment availability. So you can’t simply look for availability in the “I “bucket on a segment by segment basis. For instance, if you look at just the segment from Algiers to Madrid, it will frequently show I=0. If you look on the same day for travel onward from Madrid and including that first segment, you will see much more availability. That said it is increasingly difficult to find five seats on any given day, whereas when this fair was first posted I had no problem doing that.

Edited to add: Scratch that, it looks like this fare is available at some OTAs without regard to what a bucket tool like Expert Flyer says for the I bucket. I can find some OTAs that will sell 5 pax on dates when EF shows less than I=5 and when other OTAs would only sell 3 or 4 tix. Very odd, but I will say that Momondo does seem to do the best job of finding the OTAs that have access to the fare and can give you the number of seats you need. Increasingly I have been finding that Momondo will surface bulk fares that one or two OTAs are selling without hotel/car at the same price of the packages being discussed on other FT threads.

The number one rule of this mileage run forum should be “don’t rely exclusively on Google flights” Before you suggest something is gone, at least look at some other site besides Google flights, and ideally confirm that the fare is no longer in the GDS. Momondo and Iberia websites both seem to pick this up fairly well. It’s greatest limitation is that the fare rules have a specified set of travel agent identifiers who are able to book this. That seems to be a fairly rare thing, and in this case it means many OTA’s that you are used to using won’t be able to price or sell this particular fare. I am still on the hunt for a real life travel agent who would be able to book this for me because the options most OTA’s pull up are not what I want.

This one probably isn’t going anywhere because it isn’t a particularly cheap fare for what it is, a round-trip between Cairo and JFK that just happens to permit routing through LAX and include a stop over. The fare itself isn’t likely to get pulled, it’s more likely that someone would tighten up the routing rules. That is, as long as people don’t start abusing it, like dropping final segment back to Algiers.