Earlier I wrote about Google Flights, probably the most useful tool for comparing airfare. In this post, I’d like to cover another website I constantly use when planning air travel, which is perhaps a little less obvious.
On a near daily basis I’m curious to see what nonstop flights exist out of an airport, and on what airlines. Sometimes I do this for trips I’m actually planning, while other times I sort of fake plan trips that I hope to take at some point (as one does!).
So whether you’re looking at planning travel out of a major airport that has service to just about everywhere, or are planning travel out of a smaller airport with limited service, it helps to know what your options are. And that brings me to an often overlooked website for these purposes.
In this post:
Wikipedia’s airport pages list nonstop flight destinations
Typically if you Google something like “nonstop flights from Tampa Airport,” most of the results won’t actually be particularly useful, easy to understand, or accurate. You’ll often see ads for online travel agencies, which are simply looking to have you book tickets with them, rather than actually giving you the information you need.
If you want to see what nonstop flights are available out of a particular airport, your best bet is to go to the airport’s Wikipedia page. Scroll down to the section for “Airlines and destinations,” and you’ll get an awesome chart listing all the destinations from the airport, by airline. For example, here’s the page for Tampa Airport (TPA).
Since this is Wikipedia, the information might not be 100% accurate (that’s true of just about anything on the internet), but I find it to be pretty spot on a vast majority of the time.
Now, some might wonder if this is actually useful for a major airport that has service to a lot of destinations. I think it is, and you can always just use the page search function to specifically check on the destination you’re interested in.
Personally I find this most useful for smaller airports that I’m less familiar with. For example, I really want to visit Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and keep trying to figure out ways I can do this with a creative aviation angle. Going to the Wikipedia page for Manas International Airport (BSZ) is a great place to start.
Several other websites show nonstop flight details as well
While Wikipedia does the trick for me, in the interest of being thorough, I should mention that several other websites also try to make it easy to search the details of nonstop flights from a particular airport. For example:
- FlightsFrom lets you search nonstop flights, as you can just enter your origin airport, and then you’ll see the airlines that fly to each destination from there, along with frequencies
- FlightConnections shows all nonstop flights from an airport, with a high level of accuracy, information on frequencies, and nice visuals
- FlightAware has a Flight Finder feature, whereby you can enter an origin and destination, and it will show you all nonstop flights between the airports (which is a bit different than seeing all the nonstop destinations from a particular airport)
- Kayak has a page about nonstop flights, where you can enter the origin airport, and it’ll show you all the nonstop flight destinations, including the airlines, frequencies, etc.
Why am I not more enthusiastic about these websites, given that they offer more information than Wikipedia? Well, I appreciate how Wikipedia consolidates the information so nicely. And really finding out nonstop flights from an airport is just the very first phase of my research when booking a flight.
Once I’ve figured out the basics about air service to an airport, I head over to Google Flights, and continue the search there. So frankly I find a lot of the information displayed on these other sites to just be unnecessary, at least for my purposes.
Bottom line
Sometimes it can be useful to figure out the nonstop flights available from a particular airport, especially with the number of new point-to-point routes we see nowadays. While there are lots of websites that will show you this information, I find Wikipedia to be the best and easiest to use resource for this. Along with Google Flights, this is one of the tools I use a majority of the time when planning flights.
Anyone else love the Wikipedia airport pages for figuring out nonstop flights, or do you prefer another resource?
Back in the 90s, I flew a bit for business (no road warrior by far). I became convinced I needed the OAG pocket guide and subscribed. Travel agents would have a phone-book-sized variant. Want to get from ABQ to PIT? You look up PIT and see all the nonstops to PIT. If there were ABQ options, OK. But, if not, you'd pick a city, say STL, ORD, DFW, etc., that had a PIT nonstop, and look up that city to see if it had a n/s from ABQ until you gormed a connection.
What about from CMH?
And how exactly is this going to help on flights which have stops on the same flight number? such as Turkish Airlines' Istanbul-Singapore/Kuala Lumpur-Sydney/Melbourne, Air China's Beijing-Madrid-Sao Paulo/Havana, Emirates' Dubai-Bangkok-Hong Kong/Siem Reap/Da Nang?
Honestly, be comprehensive or don't fecking bother.
While your username seriously checks out, may I suggest something a bit more accurate like "Miserable" or "Wretched".
It's honestly hard to tell what exactly your point is, and thus I don't know if this helps or not (not that you really deserve it) but if you search the airports of any of your examples all of those cities are listed as destinations, with a footnote you can click that provides the extra context of there being a stop between. Lighten up pal.
I wish there was something superior though. Ben, remember the recent direct UA flight from Maui to Newark (with “no-window window seat” drama) that operated on a few Saturdays in December and January? It didn’t appear on Wikipedia or any of my other searches…
Thank you Ben and everyone else …. every day is a school day and today I have learned such a lot from you ‘lot’ …. :-)
I used to use Wikipedia but Flightconnections is now my go to. Visuals, plus you can even drill down to city pairs, aircraft type or find out a particular airline's network.
I like the visuals too of Flightconnections, but it only shows what's published now and it doesn't always have future service. Also it's quite annoying that schedules beyond 2 months is "premium" and requires payment. And if you want to use their mobile app, it's also "premium".
Typing the airport code, then airport wiki like "SFO Airport Wiki" is how I jump directly to an airport wiki page and avoid the AI slop pages.
Man, service has really been cut from Bishkek. I was there in 2014 and it seemed like it was having somewhat of a tourism boom. I'm surprised TK dropped it.
What's the best site for determining schedules, especially for those flights that don't operate on a daily basis?
For me, FlightConnections is perfect. Definitely recommend checking them out. I've seen routes added there first before I'd seen any news of them being added.
I use Wikipedia too, and when I saw this headline on OMAAT, I did not expect Ben to use the same method! But glad to learn of others. I wonder if the Wikipedia pages are often out of date? I suppose routes don't change *that* much.
Routes do change somewhat, but I have found that people typically keep the "Airlines and Destinations" section up to date on Wikipedia really close to real time news (I assume it is likely passionate people who love their respective home airports).
In Google (not Google Flights) type “Flight time from XXX”, replacing the XXX with an airport code. It then lists all direct flights from that airport. Very occasionally I find a glitch, but it’s a good place to start.
I too use FlightsFrom nearly daily, and I particularly enjoy filtering by alliance.
I some times use https://info.flightmapper.net/route/YY_SEA_LHR
It gives detailed information such as day of the week and when the flight is valid until, useful for seasonal flights.
I thought this was commonly known, but if you go to Google Flights and put in an origin airport and a general destination (like "Europe"), it will turn into a map display. Select "nonstop flights" only, and drag the map around and it will enable all airports of nonstop flights to appear. And you can select by alliance, etc.
For example https://www.google.com/travel/explore?tfs=CBwQAxolEgoyMDI2LTAyLTE3KABqBwgBEgNNU1ByDAgEEggvbS8wMmo5ekABSAFwAYIBCwj___________8BmAECsgEEGAEgAQ&tfu=GioaKAoSCTlAhC4SWFJAEUJkXB6VzlFAEhIJZqldH3FoKEARvpuj4WrBUsA
I thought this was commonly known, but if you go to Google Flights and put in an origin airport and a general destination (like "Europe"), it will turn into a map display. Select "nonstop flights" only, and drag the map around and it will enable all airports of nonstop flights to appear. And you can select by alliance, etc.
For example https://www.google.com/travel/explore?tfs=CBwQAxolEgoyMDI2LTAyLTE3KABqBwgBEgNNU1ByDAgEEggvbS8wMmo5ekABSAFwAYIBCwj___________8BmAECsgEEGAEgAQ&tfu=GioaKAoSCTlAhC4SWFJAEUJkXB6VzlFAEhIJZqldH3FoKEARvpuj4WrBUsA
This. The only issue is that you also have to enter a date, and if a flight does not operate on that date (e.g., because it doesn't operate 7 days per week, or it's seasonal) you'll miss it. But of course you can get around this by looking at several dates.
There are also a few airlines that Google Flights doesn't cover. For example, one or two tiny airlines in the Bahamas.
Was going to mention Google Flights Explore function, too, but clearly I'm not the only one.
To the date thing, though, you don't have to select a specific day (you can). You can also say "next 6 months", a particular month, etc.
One correction... you do have to enter a date initially, but then you can click the date box and change to "flexible dates" and search all destinations that have a flight in the next six months.
I do this too, Ben, but I automate it. I maintain an Excel workbook that pulls data directly from Wikipedia, with a separate tab for each of my “destination” airports. That way, I don’t have to open multiple Wikipedia pages and scroll through the Airlines and Destinations tables every time.
On top of that, I’ve written a small script that proactively filters out carriers I have no interest in flying........Air India, for example.
I’ve been using FlightConnections for years. I originally signed up during a holiday season for a half off promotion. Every December, when it renews, they continued to honor the original price I paid during the promotion. It is certainly a deal that I can’t see myself giving up. I use that site for nearly every trip that I construct.
I used to use wikipedia for this, but I generally don't see any advantage of reading typed out cities over just using the map feature of google flights to find all nonstop options.
Funny you used Bishkek as an example! I just booked a whole lot of flights in the Stans and while I was not so much looking for non-stop flights per se, I used Wikipedia to see what airlines are actually serving these airports. I am now booked on TezJet (RJ85, which is cool), Centrum, AeroNomad, SilkAvia (incl. Let 410 ;-), Asman Airlines, Somon Air, SCAT Airlines (I know!) and the obvious Uzbekistan Airways.In and out...
Funny you used Bishkek as an example! I just booked a whole lot of flights in the Stans and while I was not so much looking for non-stop flights per se, I used Wikipedia to see what airlines are actually serving these airports. I am now booked on TezJet (RJ85, which is cool), Centrum, AeroNomad, SilkAvia (incl. Let 410 ;-), Asman Airlines, Somon Air, SCAT Airlines (I know!) and the obvious Uzbekistan Airways.In and out of the region on LOT and Georgian Airways...
I also used the airport pages on Wikipedia (and the website of the airports) to look up how to best get to and from the city.
So yes, Wikipedia is a great tool for such exercises!
Woah, safe travels!