Geodesic

Geodesic
the shortest route between two points on the Earth

I was looking for cheap flights between Costa Rica and Tokyo and couldn’t find anything under €1,000. That seemed odd to me, because from Barcelona you can fly to both Costa Rica and Tokyo for relatively little money. Since I didn’t understand what was going on, I used the ruler tool on Google Maps to measure the geodesic distance between those points.

This is what I found:

• The distance between Barcelona and Costa Rica is relatively short, about 9,000 km, crossing the Caribbean Sea and then the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a trip I’ve done a couple of times
• Flying from Barcelona to Tokyo is a bit more complex. It’s around 10,400 km and you have to skirt around Russia. It feels long, but in theory it’s only about 15% farther
• But connecting Tokyo and Costa Rica is a completely different story. It’s about 13,200 km, almost 50% longer than the first trip. On top of that, you have to cross all of Mexico and the United States

That’s why it’s difficult, though not impossible, to find cheap flights on that route

I think the real issue was not considering the geodesic distance and instead being misled by the false straight line perception created by flat maps.