For about six months now, it seems that flights to Iceland, where I live, from very many places in the US, including where I go to visit my family, just don't show up in any search engine I've tried (Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, SkyScanner, etc.).
When I try to book a flight, it only finds flights that go through the UK or mainland Europe for $3,000 and up. However, there are dozens of flights from the east coast of the US to Reykjavik (out of IAD, BOS, JFK, and several others), and those flights tend to cost about $3-500 and depart late at night. And there are of course thousands of ways to get to any of those cities by early afternoon with many hours to make the connection, but the search engines just can't find them.
For example, I'm trying to fly from Little Rock (LIT) to Reykjavik (KEF) on December 28. Putting that into Orbitz directly finds the cheapest flight as $3450 going LIT-DFW->LHR->KEF.
Ideally, I'd fly though DC, but it turns out not to matter. I'll use IAD in DC for the following examples though.
If I try a multi-city search (LIT->IAD, IAD->KEF), it comes up with a $3700 fare that goes (LIT->IAH->IAD->LHR->KEF).
OK, so let's just try getting to DC only. Searching for LIT->IAD comes up with a quite reasonable LIT->DFW->IAD itinerary for $230, landing at IAD at 12:15 PM.
Now let's try IAD->KEF (for which I know there's a direct Icelandair flight). Sure enough, it finds that direct flight for $363 departing IAD at 7:45 PM.
Even if I try to explicitly specify exactly which flights to take (LIT->DFW->IAD->KEF), it still routes the last leg through Heathrow and rings up a total of $5500.
I can just book two entirely separate trips, and if nothing goes wrong, it costs about $600. But this means that I'm on the hook for the connecting flight if something goes wrong and they strand me somewhere. And of course I won't be able to just check my bag all the way through, avoid going through security a second time, etc.
Does anyone have any advice? I'm not sure who to contact -- is it Icelandair, Orbitz, someone else? If I wade through phone support somewhere, is this a thing they can fix either before or after I buy tickets? Or do I just suck it up and book separate flights?