Airline Route Maps

January 18, 2012 By Meghan Hunter

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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!

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