Continuing our series on some of the key tools I use when searching for awards and planning trips, today let’s focus on an important tool in every frequent flyer’s arsenal: FlightConnections.com.
As you look to leverage loyalty programs to their maximum value, there is one key question that you’ll find yourself asking over and over again: “Which airlines fly where?”
FlightConnections sets out to answer this question in an easily digestible fashion, helping you visualize, at a glance, the routing possibilities at hand for your dream trip.
Sign Up for FlightConnections Premium
FlightConnections Features & Pricing
FlightConnections is available in both free and paid versions. The free version has most of the basic features that you’ll want to use, and it’ll probably be enough for most users.
However, the paid version offers a few useful features of its own, such as numerous filters, a full-screen map view, flight schedules, a faster experience, and no advertisements.
The Premium service is marketed as €2.99 per month, but is billed annually at €35.88 for the year:
1. Find All Direct Flights from Your Airport
The power of FlightConnections lies in its comprehensive database of all of the world’s airlines, airports, and scheduled flights, which is diligently updated on a regular basis.
When you first load up the website, you’re presented with a world map full of dots, each representing an airport somewhere in the world.
The dots are colour-coded based on their relative size and prominence within the global route network: blue dots denote large airports with over 30 direct destinations, yellow dots denote medium-sized airports with 7–30 direct destinations, and red dots denote small airports with less than seven direct destinations.
By clicking on any of the dots, or entering your desired airport in the “From” box at the top, you’ll be able to access FlightConnections’s first key piece of information: which direct flights are currently serving your chosen airport.
For example, someone from Edmonton who’s curious which direct flights they could take for their next vacation would be presented with the following:
Looking at this map, we can see plenty of options for direct flights within North America, including the WestJet services to Hawaii, as well as a KLM flight to Amsterdam and a seasonal Condor flight to Frankfurt.
If our Edmonton-based traveller were willing to connect to a larger hub like Toronto first, they’d have a much wider range of options for onward flights:
2. Find Routings Between Two Airports
In addition to showing all of the direct flights out of a certain airport, FlightConnections’s other primary capability is to display a handful of the most logical routings between any two airports on any combination of the world’s airlines.
When you’re first planning a trip and you only have a destination in mind, you’d want to figure out which options you have for flying to and from your destination.
Then, you could think about which of the routing possibilities appeal to you the most, which points you’d need in which programs to book those specific flights, and finally, how to earn the number of points required to complete your booking.
Let’s take the example of a Toronto-based traveller who wants to visit South Africa, starting in Johannesburg. In this scenario, you’d enter “YYZ” and “JNB” in the “From” and “To” fields, respectively.
(Note that FlightConnections currently only supports individual airports, and does not support IATA’s metropolitan codes for cities with co-terminal airports [e.g., NYC, TYO, LON], so you may need to run multiple searches if you’re looking at a city that’s served by multiple airports.)
Since there are no direct flights between these two cities, FlightConnections defaults to the “1 Stop” search mode, showing you a plethora of one-stop routing options on your way to South Africa. You’ll see these routings displayed on the world map, as well as on the left-side informational panel, where they’re listed in the order of the itinerary’s duration from shortest to longest.
The routing that requires the least flight time is to fly to New York (EWR) first with Air Canada or United, and then catch the United service directly to Johannesburg.
Some other options include Cathay Pacific through Hong Kong, Egyptair through Cairo, Turkish Airlines through Istanbul, a more — all of which are displayed on the map as well.
As you scroll through these options, you might find some of them particularly appealing, while others might be immediately discounted because they aren’t bookable using the miles you currently have.
This brings us to the even more powerful way to use FlightConnections: filtering the search based on alliance, airline, and class of service.
3. Filter by Alliance (Premium Feature)
Whether you’re looking for direct flights or for possible routings between two given cities, you can use the Alliance filter, exclusive to Premium users, to tailor the search results towards whatever points currencies you may already have.
If you’re planning an Aeroplan redemption, for example, you might filter for all Star Alliance airlines, or if you’re putting together an Avios multi-carrier award, then it’s Oneworld alliance flights that you’d be looking for.
Let’s suppose that a Vancouver-based traveller wants to visit Morocco and Thailand. If they’re planning to redeem Aeroplan miles for the trip, then filtering by Star Alliance will instantly show all the possible routing options on Star Alliance airlines to get to Casablanca for the first stop of the trip.
Then, since our traveller wants add a stopover in Casablanca for 5,000 Aeroplan points before continuing on to Bangkok, they want to see if there are any direct flights to Asia.
By simply putting Casablanca into the “From” field, with the Star Alliance filter on, the map reveals all of the direct routing possibilities:
From the results, our traveller notes that there aren’t any direct flights to Asia from Casablanca, so they enter Bangkok in the “To” field to see which Star Alliance options are available.
The results show two options with one stop: Turkish Airlines via Istanbul and Lufthansa via Frankfurt.
Now aware of the available options, our traveller could then search for award availability in their chosen class of service on the Aeroplan website, taking into account the routing rules on complex Aeroplan rewards.
As a final step, we need to figure out how to get our traveller home from Bangkok to Vancouver:
Our traveller notices that there’s a direct flight available from Bangkok to Vancouver on Air Canada, but unfortunately, it doesn’t line up with the dates they want to travel.
Instead, they try searching for the same route, with the Star Alliance filter on, but allowing for one-stop along the way.
Our traveller now sees a number of attractive options: EVA Air via Taipei, ANA via Tokyo, or even Thai Airways and Air Canada via Sydney.
However, here’s where one weakness of FlightConnections is apparent: there’s no way to filter out certain airlines after you’ve filtered by Alliance.
Indeed, if you try to tick or untick individual airlines using the “Airline” filter (which we’ll also cover below), the Alliance filter gets cleared at the same time.
It would be great to see FlightConnections implement the ability to check off certain airlines within an alliance in the future – whether it’s to remove high-surcharge airlines from a certain alliance search, or to add a few other partners to an existing alliance search (such as including Etihad Airways alongside Star Alliance if you’re looking for Aeroplan awards).
4. Filter by Airline
Speaking of filtering by individual airlines, the Airline filter does exactly what it says: it shows you all of the flight routes operated by a specific airline.
You don’t even need to specify a certain origin airport to use this feature. If you start with the default world map and choose an airline on the list, you’ll see all of its routes show up, whether it’s a global carrier like Air Canada…
…or a regional airline like Canadian North…
…or even an airline you’ve never heard of, like 40-Mile Air, the airline serving Alaska’s back-country:
If you’re like me and love to look at the route maps in the back of an airline’s in-flight magazine whenever you fly with a new airline, then I’m sure you’ll love this FlightConnections feature as well. I know I could probably spend hours poring through all of the airlines’ route maps one by one.
Now, how might this feature be useful beyond providing entertainment for aviation geeks?
Well, you might be interested in figuring out where in the world you can fly with Etihad Airways on your next Aeroplan redemption, and you can easily do that by filtering for Etihad Airways:
5. Filter by Class of Service (Premium Feature)
The third filter, available only for Premium users, is for Class of Service.
Since almost every flight these days comes with at least business class and economy class, this feature is mostly useful for finding airlines and routes that offer either First Class or premium economy.
Taking our Etihad example, we can easily filter for which of the airline’s routes offer a First Class cabin, allowing you to sample the best that the airline has to offer:
You can also search for direct flights offering a specific class out of a particular city. For example, by entering “Toronto” in the “From” field and selecting the “First Class” filter, we can see which direct flights offer First Class.
Note that the Class of Service filter doesn’t always provide 100% accurate information, so the FlightConnections search results should be treated as a starting point, rather than as gospel, for your aspirational trip planning.
As a final note, these days a lot of travellers prefer to buy flights in premium economy in order to get a little bit of extra comfort on a long-haul journey while still paying a reasonable fare. The problem is that only a handful of airlines around the world offer premium economy, and even then, it’s usually only available with a fraction of their fleet.
Luckily, FlightConnections makes it very easy to find out which direct flights out of your chosen city offer a premium economy product:
6. Filter by Price (Premium Feature)
One of the newer features on FlightConnections is the ability to search by price. This allows you to visualize how far you can get on a certain budget for cash flights.
For example, suppose a traveller from Calgary wants to see how far they can go without over-stretching their budget. By adding “Calgary” in the “From” field, they can then click on “Price View” on the map, switching the view from “Default” to “Price.”
Each destination is represented by a coloured dot, which corresponds to different pricing bands as indicated at the lower left corner of the map.
Our traveller has always wanted to go to Paris and notices that the prices seem within their budget. By clicking on the orange dot for Paris, they can bring up a pricing calendar and scroll month by month to see the cheapest non-stop flights on any particular day.
At the moment, the pricing feature is only available for flights in economy; though going forward, it would be nice to see it available in all classes of service.
7. Flight Timetables and Schedules
The final FlightConnections feature that we’ll look at is the flight timetables and schedules.
When you click on a certain flight between two cities, you’ll see all of the information about the flight on the left-side information panel:
You’ll be able to see the flight distance, flight duration, and a weekly timetable of the days of the week on which the flight is operated.
Expanding this section allows you to look at the flight schedule at a more granular level, including flight numbers, flight arrival and departure times, and any changes in the weekly schedule throughout the upcoming months.
If you’re ready to book a cash fare, then FlightConnections lets you conduct the search directly from its website. It redirects you to a pop-up search result page powered by Kayak, from which you can then complete your booking.
However, if you’re using FlightConnections purely for informational purposes, then you’ll want to simply note down all of your potential flight and routing options to help you build your dream itinerary though the loyalty program of your choice.
Conclusion
FlightConnections is one of my favourite websites as an avid flyer and frequent traveller, whether I’m trying to understand how to make a First Class dream come true or simply deep-diving into the flight networks within remote parts of the world out of sheer curiosity.
With comprehensive coverage of the world’s airports, and an effective filter system for alliances, airlines, classes of service, and prices, (not to mention a dedicated team that’s continuously making improvements to the service), FlightConnections is an invaluable tool along anyone’s trip planning process, and I strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with it.
Sign Up for FlightConnections Premium
