How to See All the Flights You've Taken on a Map

Step 1: Rebuild the list of your flights

No tool can draw a flight it does not know about. Every method below starts with a list: date, departure airport, arrival airport, and ideally the flight number. Four sources cover most travelers.

• Airline accounts. Frequent flyer programs usually keep an activity list. How far back it goes depends on the airline, so check each one you have used. The full method is in how to find your flight history.
• Booking emails. Search your inbox for words like itinerary, e-ticket and boarding pass. Confirmations carry the route and date.
• Your calendar. Airline invitations, travel apps and your own events often hold the flight number and times.
• Paper and memory. Old boarding passes, passport stamps, photos and credit card statements fill the gaps.

Which tools can draw the map?

Once you have the list, three kinds of tools can plot it.

• Route-drawing websites. You type airport codes and the site draws great-circle arcs. The Great Circle Mapper (gcmap.com) does this and works well for a one-off image. It does not store your history.
• Web flight diaries. OpenFlights (openflights.org) and myFlightradar24 let you keep a logbook online and show your routes on a map. Both can export your data as a CSV file, so you are not locked in. See the guides for OpenFlights and myFlightradar24.
• Mobile flight-log apps. They store the list on your phone and draw it as a globe or flat map, and add statistics. Flighty documents a map of past flights in its help center. FlightLog is another.

A map of the great-circle arc is a straight line on a globe, which often looks curved on a flat map. That is normal: it is the shortest path between two points. Connecting flights appear as separate routes unless the app links them.

How to do it with FlightLog

FlightLog is a flight diary for iPhone, iPad and Android. Every route you log appears on an interactive 3D globe and on a 2D map, and a separate map shows the countries you have visited. You can fill it in several ways:

1. Type a flight number and a date. The schedule lookup fills in the airports and times.
2. Scan a paper or digital boarding pass, with the camera or from a photo. It reads the barcode and the printed text. See how to scan a boarding pass.
3. Forward your booking emails to your personal import address. The flights arrive as pending flights you confirm. See importing booking emails.
4. Import trips from your phone calendar: calendar import.
5. Import a file exported from another app, such as Flighty, myFlightradar24, OpenFlights or TripIt.

FlightLog is free to download. Every feature is free with your 10 most recent flights active, and Premium unlocks the complete history. It works offline, with an optional account to sync your journal.

What else can you see once the flights are on the map?

A complete list also gives you totals. You can see how far you have flown (see how many miles you have flown), which countries you have visited and which airlines and aircraft types you used. FlightLog adds year-by-year statistics and a passport page with one stamp per country. If you want to start a habit rather than a one-time rebuild, read how to keep a flight diary.

How long does it take?

Rebuilding is mostly a search job. A traveler with a few dozen flights can usually collect the list in an evening if the emails and accounts still exist. Importing a file from another app takes a few minutes. Older flights from before email confirmations are the slow part, and they come from memory, passports and paper.