It is often useful to be able to plot the rays for a given environment for illustrative purposes. Also for high-frequency problems the ray model provides results more rapidly. The results are almost inevitably less accurate than KRAKEN or SCOOTER calculations but sometimes the inaccuracy is negligible.
BELLHOP is not particularly efficient as far as ray models are concerned, nor is it very general. With regard to efficiency the model actually is set up internally to do a full range-dependent ray trace while it allows only for a range-independent input structure.
BELLHOP differs from standard ray models in using a robust variant of Gaussian beam tracing referred to as geometric beam tracing. For those familiar with traditional implementations of ray tracing, the results are often astonishingly accurate.