Earlier I wrote about Google Flights, probably the most useful tool for comparing airfare. In this post I wanted 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.
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 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, especially since flights on some airlines (like Southwest) often won’t show up through online travel agencies.
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 (FRU) is a great place to start.
FlightsFrom also shows nonstop flights
While Wikipedia does the trick for me, I should mention that FlightsFrom.com is a good alternative. Just enter the airport code or departure city, and you’ll see all the airlines that fly to each destination from there, along with frequencies.
Why am I not more enthusiastic about FlightsFrom, given that it has 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 here unnecessary 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?
I usually get started with wikipedia and then check on Expertflyer for specific dates. The problem with Expertflyer is that it is painful if you don’t know the start or termination date.
I even enjoy doing that exact same thing with airport’s Wikipedia pages without planning on going anywhere - just to see what the scale and versatility of an unknown airport is.
As you say, Ben, it’s generally very accurate. Although curiously enough the other day I was looking at Gatwick to Tallinn flights and saw on Gatwick’s wiki page they listed AirBaltic as operating a direct flight. Could I see one on their website?...
I even enjoy doing that exact same thing with airport’s Wikipedia pages without planning on going anywhere - just to see what the scale and versatility of an unknown airport is.
As you say, Ben, it’s generally very accurate. Although curiously enough the other day I was looking at Gatwick to Tallinn flights and saw on Gatwick’s wiki page they listed AirBaltic as operating a direct flight. Could I see one on their website? It would seem not.
Anyway, I’m totally into airport Wikipedia ‘Airlines and destinations’ charts. In fact, if I was flying from a hub to a hub, say Paris to Frankfurt, that would be the first website I’d go to just to see my airline options. Then it’s onto their sites next.
I'm in the habit of going to FlightAware and using the "Flight Finder" feature. That feature makes it very clear if there are currently any direct flights between any given pair of cities. If there are, it gives you the airlines and schedules in one quick table.
And my greatest irritation - people in the industry and even airlines referring to flights as “direct “ for non- stop, basic rooky error - not to mention misleading and inaccurate
Flightradar also has a function for this, in convenient map form
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Expert Flyer.
YES!!!! I also do this and it is so helpful and also fun to discover for different countries and smaller airpots!
I think you can get non stops from Skyscanner
The Wikipedia is the best hack ever, I would never have thought about this. I tried with 2 small airports in Europe and got great results, even learned about the reopening of a direct connection I wasn't aware of!
Please do not put the word Direct and Non-Stop in the same headline. They are completely different.
Was doing a search for LGA direct flights and apparently AA has roundtrip flight from LGA-AUA leaving LGA 12/31 and returning 1/7. Other then those two flights they have no other flights to AUA from LGA. I wonder if this is the longest flight out of LGA considering its above 2000 miles and LGA has that 1500 mile limit other then Saturdays
My favourite trick is to use plain old Google.
Type in “Flight time from XXX” (no quotation marks, and replace XXX with the three letter airport code).
Google then shows a “top three” cities with their flight times. Click “more” just underneath, and every city with a non-stop flight should appear.
I use SkyScanner for this type of explorative search.
You can find all direct flights by searching from the airport in question to "Everywhere" and "whole month" and get a list of destinations by country and price point...
Once you pick a destination, you get the price per day, as well as airlines serving the route...
I find it especially helpful if I'm flexible with my itinerary.
Bishkek is pretty horrible. Its drab, bland, and unsafe once the sun goes down. Ala Archa National Park (not far) is amazing, and the countryside is stunning, but don't stay in Bishkek any longer than you need to for your flights in and out. Almaty, on the other hand, is super cool and worth a couple days, recent issues notwithstanding.
wikipedia has fan boys that insist that Horizon flights be put down as Alaska Airlines but also insist that other airlines regional airlines but disguised as the mainline. Don't fight it or they will ban you. They are anonymous youngster troublemakers that vote for themselves as administrators (having power to ban you)
In most cases you cannot book regionals independently. They operate as wholly owned subsidiaries or franchises. To book horizon it’s at Alaska.com, klm city hopper via klm.com and so forth.
Wikipedia has some troublemakers that weaponize the system to ban you. They call it block. A few of those troublemakers are vandals who want wrong info in wikipedia. They are called administrators, who are anonymous youngsters who voter for each other.
Wikipedia is wacky. Don't help them. I've seen wrong info that has been there for years. Terrible.
Flightsfrom.com is woefully out of date on their schedules. Every time I use it to check a flight (specifically by aircraft), its always wrong.
I concur. The website is good but out of date info makes it useless.
You can also use www.kayak.com/direct
"...I really want to visit Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan..."
What a coincidence, that's our next vacation! Maybe see you there?
It’s a great city, one of the ones I get to regularly go to for work. Definitely grab a drink at Iwa, the restaurant/bar at the top of the Sheraton. great views of the city.
also a big fan of flightconnections.com... the paid subscription gets rid of the annoying Ads, and i like the airline/alliance filter. but the App needs some work, and also forces me to choose a log in between the App and desktop site
kayak.com/direct can also be helpful
I agree with Ben that Wikipedia is surprising useful for this, and I also used it for a recent 'Stans' trip planning. The other things which you can use is Flightradar 24, and just put in the airport and click departures. You will be able to see 3 days worth of departures and it gives you a much quicker idea of the departure times (but it's incomplete because you miss days of departure). FR24 is a great combo/cross-check with Wikipedia.
If you navigate to an airport on FlightRadar24, under its info tab there is also a list of routes / destinations, including weekly frequency.
The Google Search term you're looking for is:
"Flight schedule from XXX", where XXX is the airport code.
Also work as "flight schedule from XXX to YYY", with corresponding flights.
Your comment didn’t appear when I first read this, so I’m afraid I’ve duplicated your helpful posts (though we seem to use slightly different phrasing). Apologies for it looking like I was ignoring you.
I often find it remarkable how poor official airport websites can be. Some don’t even list all flight options while others fail to differentiate between direct and nonstop flights. Wikipedia, Google Flights and the other options listed here are definitely solid.
Flightconnections is my go-to now but Wikipedia a close second.
I use Wikipedia all the time too, by FlightsFrom is a new tool for me, and I love it already! Especially helpful that you can filter by airline alliance, that really helps when you have particular airline mileage currencies you're looking to use.
Hands down my favorite website for this is FlightConnections.com. It shows all the nonstop destinations on a beautiful map, and you can filter by airline, aircraft, day of the week etc.. It is directly fed from airline reservation systems so the information is 100% accurate. The only minor issue is that it can take 2 weeks or so for new information (new routes, cancelled routes) to load.
+1 on FlightConnections. I also sometimes use Google Flights' "explore" option, enter the airport and date(s) in question, and then select nonstop only and see what pops up. I've noticed that this method can occasionally miss available options, though.
100%. Though one thing I have noticed is that Google Flights can be a bit buggy on the Explore side of things. It will sometimes only display a limited number of destinations and if you zoom in you suddenly see more options. So as long as you play with it, it is a great tool!
+1 again on flight connections. There's even a paid version that'll let you filter for nonstops from an airport by alliance. So it can show you, e.g., all nonstops on SkyTeam from DTW.
I came to recommend flightconnections.com but Izz beat me to it. It is my first stop whether I am investigating flights or just daydreaming. It's not 100% accurate (nothing is) but it reveals all kinds of options that Kayak, Google Flights, et al either don't tell me about at all or bury so deep that I would not have found them.
I tend to use Wikipedia too, but I did notice frequently that info was not updated during the pandemic. We traveled a lot this past summer, including several smaller airports in Europe (mostly eastern Europe) and several times I'd check Wikipedia, then go look for flights only to find out they were either discontinued or the route hadn't resumed yet. Hopefully this improves now that travel is more or less fully open.
I've found that section on Wikipedia to be incalculably valuable in trip planning - as aggregator websites, in addition to being incomplete, tend to display options in what I will diplomatically describe as an "incomprehensibly chaotic" order. There might be a perfect option on page 27, but I don't have that kind of time.