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I’ve been emailing with a reader who was asking for a consolidated airline route map, and I thought it might help to share what I found.
I always study the airline route maps whenever I’m in a plane – even if it is a short 1 hour flight. It’s kinda nice to daydream about my next trip and to see where my miles can take me!
I also rip the maps out of the magazine (perhaps I should just take the whole magazine so that they are replaced) and bring them home so that I can lay them out on the dining table and study them.
Emily: Such a nerd!
Knowing which routes airlines fly on is very important while trying to redeem your miles. That’s because you can always look at airline partners and greatly expand your options when using your miles.
For example, if you have United miles, you can also use your miles to travel on Star Alliance partner airlines such as Lufthansa, Swiss, or Thai. So instead of looking for only United flights from the US to Europe, you can look for Swiss, Continental, US Air, and Lufthansa flights to Europe as well.
Or say you want to go from Bangkok to Frankfurt. Instead of just looking at routes from Bangkok, look at routes from Bangkok to another Asian city, say, Delhi and from that other city (Delhi) to your destination (Frankfurt).
This will open up a lot more possibilities.
Anyway, here’s what I found:
1. Airline Route Maps
Airline Route Maps has an easy interface (see image above) and you just click the airline for which you’re looking to find route maps.
I liked that you could search routes by hub city as well as by partner and international routes.
I didn’t like that the route list didn’t seem to be up to date. For example, there was no mention of Kingfisher Airlines in the section on India.
2. Airline Route Mapper
cockpitvisit on FlyerTalk developed the Airline Route Mapper tool which is a tool for the most determined of you.
It is very comprehensive and covers 650 airlines, but could be a little intimidating at first.
Here’s the link to the download page for this app.
3. Open Flights
OpenFlights is a handy tool to find out all the flights which originate from a certain airport.
You just type in the name of the airport in the search box, and then click on the route to find out details about the airline flying that route.
But again, I did find instances when it didn’t cover every flight from an airport.
I suppose you’ll get the most up to date information on the airline websites, but it is hard to juggle multiple maps in multiple browsers.
Bottom Line: These are some interesting tools to help with your next award booking (or to just day dream!)
Please comment if you know of other helpful tools to see airline routes!
Thanks for sharing! I always end up hunting down the PDF for a given airline whenever I need this, cluttering up my downloads folder, but it really helps to have them all in one place.
You are so misbehaved! Don’t rip the pages anymore! Besides, routes change all the time
Why don’t you take a picture instead? I’m thinking of you as the guy who ripped the page of the magazines I’ve seen without them. Very annoying considering that I love those maps too. 🙂
@Extra Pack of Peanuts & @Susan Sent Us – You’re not alone. I have a map on the wall in my study and look at it almost everyday!
@Jay – You’re welcome!
@captain carry-on & @Jorgeluis500 | – I know I shouldn’t just rip ’em out, but should take the entire magazine with me!
So you’re the guy ripping the maps out of all the magazines. I too though I was alone when I sit for hours staring at the maps thinking how to get from here to there or no maybe even there. How far north or maybe south it’s possible to fly. The possibilities are endless. Great blog . Thank you
Daraius, I thought I was the only one! 🙂 Thanks so much for posting this. @ IPBrian, you’ve brought back memories of planning my TWA trips on my days off when I worked for them back in the eighties. Love the archive.com site.
Great Post and Thanks for your hard work!