Difference between revisions of "Finding flight options"
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=== Using a flight search tool to find the “normal” routes === | === Using a flight search tool to find the “normal” routes === | ||
| − | '''If you just want to determine the most likely airlines and routes to your destination, the easiest approach is to use a traditional flight booking tool, like Google Flights or Expedia'''. Just enter the information for your trip, and you’ll see a listing of (most of) your flight options. As normal, it is easiest to search for one direction at a time. | + | '''If you just want to determine the most likely airlines and routes to your destination, the easiest approach is to use a traditional flight booking tool, like Google Flights or Expedia'''. |
| + | |||
| + | Just enter the information for your trip, and you’ll see a listing of (most of) your flight options. As normal, it is easiest to search for one direction at a time. | ||
<ul class="bulletlist"> | <ul class="bulletlist"> | ||
| − | <li>'''If you are looking for award options, you don’t need to worry about the cash prices'''. | + | <li>'''If you are looking for award options, you don’t need to worry about the cash prices'''. Your best award options may or may not be one of the lowest priced tickets. You aren't going to pay the cash price, and it might not be indicative of whether there is any award availability.</li> |
<li>'''To quickly uncover the most convenient options, you can sort the results by “duration”, rather than by price'''. The sort option on Google Flights is located on the right side, just above the flight listings.</li> | <li>'''To quickly uncover the most convenient options, you can sort the results by “duration”, rather than by price'''. The sort option on Google Flights is located on the right side, just above the flight listings.</li> | ||
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{{Image|GoogleFlightsSingapore.jpg}} | {{Image|GoogleFlightsSingapore.jpg}} | ||
| − | <li>''' | + | <li>'''With a regular ticket search, you can easily see your different airline options. And if you are constructing a segment-by-segment trip, which intermediate connecting points are the most likely candidates'''. |
| + | |||
| + | To see what flight options are available, you can choose arbitrary travel dates near when you want to fly. If you have some flexibility in your travel dates, you should ideally search a couple different days, so that you uncover flight options that don’t operate every day of the week. And try to search for dates near your expected travel dates, or at least a few weeks in the future, to avoid missing flights that are already sold out or that are only available seasonally . </li> | ||
</ul> | </ul> | ||
Revision as of 11:53, 1 May 2019
Understanding the various ways you can fly to your destination can be invaluable when you are trying to book airplane tickets. It you are trying to book award tickets, it helps you uncover all the possible airlines that you can check for award availability. And if you are searching segment-by-segment, it helps uncover various flight options to investigate.
Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, there are a variety of tools that can help you determine the available flight options.
Jump to
Jump to:
- 1 Using a flight search tool to find the “normal” routes
- 2 Finding all the nonstop routes
- 3 Finding all the flight options TO a destination
- 4 Finding all the options for connecting between two cities
- 5 Finding all the cities that are served by an airline
- 6 Finding cheap connections for the final leg
Using a flight search tool to find the “normal” routes
If you just want to determine the most likely airlines and routes to your destination, the easiest approach is to use a traditional flight booking tool, like Google Flights or Expedia.
Just enter the information for your trip, and you’ll see a listing of (most of) your flight options. As normal, it is easiest to search for one direction at a time.
- If you are looking for award options, you don’t need to worry about the cash prices. Your best award options may or may not be one of the lowest priced tickets. You aren't going to pay the cash price, and it might not be indicative of whether there is any award availability.
- To quickly uncover the most convenient options, you can sort the results by “duration”, rather than by price. The sort option on Google Flights is located on the right side, just above the flight listings.
- With a regular ticket search, you can easily see your different airline options. And if you are constructing a segment-by-segment trip, which intermediate connecting points are the most likely candidates. To see what flight options are available, you can choose arbitrary travel dates near when you want to fly. If you have some flexibility in your travel dates, you should ideally search a couple different days, so that you uncover flight options that don’t operate every day of the week. And try to search for dates near your expected travel dates, or at least a few weeks in the future, to avoid missing flights that are already sold out or that are only available seasonally .
Finding all the nonstop routes
In order to piece together an award itinerary, segment-by-segment, you need to determine the different possibilities for flying into or out of a city. For example, you might want to find all the possible cities that connect directly to your destination, or you may want to find all the cities within a region where you can fly directly from your home airport.
On a map
Our favorite tool for exploring routing options is FightConnections.com. Once you use it, you'll fall in love too. To see all the flights, to a destination, just enter the airport into the From box. For example, here are all the nonstop flights from Tahiti. You can hover over the little markers to see the names of the airports.
If you want to fly from the US to Tahiti, you can see from the map that you might want to check for availability from Los Angeles, Honolulu, or Easter Island, and then see if you can get to one of those gateway cities.
If you click on one of the routes on the map, Flight Connections will display the various options for flying that route. For each flight, you can easily see which days of the week it operates. And, if you hover over the day, you’ll see the exact timing, duration, and length of the flight. In our example, we see that we can fly either Air France or Air Tahiti Nui from Los Angeles to Tahiti.
FlightConnections can only show all the flights TO a city, rather than FROM the city. However, in most cases, the same city pairs are connected in both directions, so at least the routes will be mostly the same. But, sometimes a specific route is only offered in one direction.
FlightConnections has recently started charging for more than 10 "sessions" per month. Each session can include many different searches. If you run into the limit, you can run FlightConnections in "private" browsing mode, pay them for their service, or switch to FlightFrom.com.
On Wikipedia
Another way to get a comprehensive list of all the nonstop flight options to a given airport, is with Wikipedia.
Every airport article on Wikipedia contains a listing of all the airlines that operate out of that airport, and where they fly to. For example, this is the section from the “Fa’a’a International Airport” article (for the Tahiti airport).
Some people prefer this type of table, rather than the map that is displayed by FlightConnections.com. It is also a bit easier to work your way through each step of a routing. For example, if you wanted to further investigate the Santiago option, you could click on “Santiago” in the table above. That would take you to Santiago airport article that lists all the options for getting to the Santiago airport.
In this case, LATAM Chile’s North American gateways are Los Angeles, Miami, and JFK. So, you could look for flights from those cities to Santiago, and then onwards to Tahiti. Because LATAM is part of Oneworld, you could also connect to Santiago with any other Oneworld airline. For example, you could fly American Airlines to Santiago from Dallas or Miami. But, you couldn’t book a single award that combined the LATAM flight between Santiago and Tahiti with Delta’s flight from Atlanta to Santiago, or United’s flight from Houston to Santiago.
With Kayak
Kayak has a very useful feature that shows all of the "direct" flights from a city. This includes non-stop flights, as well as flights that make a stop, but where you can stay on the same plane. Some people will prefer the listing-based view, to the map view provided by FlightConnections, and the alternative list-based view in Wikipedia.
The feature is not available in the Kayak app, but is available through the website at www.kayak.com/direct.
If you click on the little plus-sign for each city, you can see the details for each of the flight options.
Finding all the flight options TO a destination
The only tool on the Internet that allows you to find all the flights specifically TO a destination is SkyScanner. The other useful tools (e.g. FlightConnections, Wikipedia, Google Flights, Kayak Explore) will only show the flights FROM a destination. When you use one of these other tools, you may miss a route that flies into, but not out of a city, which sometimes happens with "circular" routes.
With Skyscanner, all you need to do is to enter your desired departure country into the "From" box. You'll then see the lowest fares from the different possible departure cities, and which ones offer non-stop flights.
Finding all the options for connecting between two cities
Sometimes, it is easier to focus on the nonstop flights into or out of a city, and then gradually build up an itinerary that has award space. Other times, it may be convenient to just see all the different connections you can use fly between two cities, even if they include a stop or two.
If you enter two airports into FightConnections, it will list all the connections between those two cities.
For example, if you want to fly between Seattle and Tahiti, you can see that your 1-stop options are to fly through Los Angeles and Honolulu, and that the Los Angeles route is a bit shorter.
For each connecting city, Flight Connections will show the options for each leg of the trip. You can narrow down the options, to see only those flights that use the same airline for each of thelegs. However, you can usually use two different partner airlines as part of the same award, so you’ll need to figure out valid combinations of airlines on your own.
Finding all the cities that are served by an airline
Some award redemption sweet spots require you to take advantage of flights on a specific airline. Or you might know that a specific airline is having an award sale.
On a map
If you want to find all the cities that are served by that airline, you can enter the name of the airline into FightConnections.
For example, here are all the cities served by WOW Airlines:
FlightConnections has recently started charging for more than 10 "sessions" per month. Each session can include many different searches. If you run into the limit, you can run FlightConnections in "private" browsing mode, pay them for their service, or switch to FlightFrom.com.
On Wikipedia
Once again, Wikipedia is a good alternative.
Every airline has an article on Wikipedia that lists all its destinations. For example, “WOW Airline destinations” shows all the cities that WOW Airlines serves. To more easily see the options for the US (or any other country), click on the top of the “Country” column to sort the list. Be careful of any city or row that has a grey background—that usually signals a destination that is no longer available. Wikipedia, will also show you information about announced, but not yet operating, routes.
For example, you can easily see the 7 US cities that are served by WOW, the one city that has seasonal service, and the 5 additional cities that are coming in 2018.
Finding cheap connections for the final leg
Sometimes you won’t be able to find award availability all the way to your destination. However, you might be able to use award travel to get to a different destination along the way, and then take advantage of a cheap flight on a discount airline to get to your final destination.
For example, if you can’t find award availability to Bali, you might be able to find award availability to Kuala Lumpur, and then combine it with a $60 flight on Air Asia between Kuala Lumpur and Bali.
Unfortunately, there is no way to directly find all the cheap flights into a destination like Bali. However, there are several options for finding all the cheap flights out of the place you want to go. Your best option is to look at these, to find good candidates, and assume that the prices will be roughly similar in reverse.
For example, you can use Skyscanner to search for flights from Bali to “Everywhere”. You can even limit the flight options to show only nonstop flights (which are well suited for the final leg in an international journey).
A little exploring lets you see that you might have good options to fly to Bali through Singapore or Kuala Lumpur.
If you'd prefer to used a mapped-based view, you can use Google Flight's Explore Map. Just make sure to use the "Stops" filter in the upper-right of the map, to narrow down the options to nonstop flights.
