Many protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks such as AODV propose construction routes reactively using flooding. The advantage hereof is, that no prior assumptions of the network topology are required in order to provide routing between any pair of nodes in the network. In mobile networks, where the topology is subject to frequent changes, this is a particularly attractive property. In this paper, we investigate the effect of using flooding for acquiring routes. We show, that flooding may lead to non-optimal routes in terms of number of hops. This implies that more retransmissions are needed to send a packet along a route. We proceed by providing a qualitative analysis of the route lengths. Finally, we propose and evaluate through simulations, alternative flooding schemes such as MPR flooding and Suoerflooding. MPR flooding considerably reduces the flooding overhead and provides shorter routes very close to optimal. Superfloo- ding provides optimal routes but to the cost of an significant but anyhow reasonable increase of flooding overhead.