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I like travel tools, and there are lots of times where in planning trips, I need to know which airlines fly between a particular set of cities. One of my favorite tools for doing this is called Airline Route Mapper.

Airline Route Mapper is a stand-alone tool that you can download (which can be nice if you’re not able to connect to the Internet, or alternately frustrating if you are and don’t happen to have it installed on the device you have). It installs a few files and then you just run the executable file to launch the app.

You can select a city and see all the direct flights from that city.

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The Airline Route Mapper flights from Cincinnati

Mousing over a city connection will show you which airlines fly the route, as well as with what type of aircraft (the aircraft type I have not found to be 100% correct).

airline-route-mapper-phl-sfo-example

You can also filter by a specific airline – here are all the flights ONLY on Southwest Airlines from Columbus (CMH).

airline-route-mapper-cmh

Mile Matrix

Airline Route Mapper works hand in hand with the Mile Matrix, which is a tool I built that aims to show you the number of miles it takes to redeem an award flight from any country to any other country on any airline.

(SEE ALSO: Mile Matrix: Any country to any other country on any airline)
(SEE ALSO: Using the Mile Matrix app for cheap travel to Australia)

mile-matrix-filtered-india

It does no good to know that it takes 42,500 miles to go from the US to India on United Economy Class, without knowing who you can fly on! In addition to showing specific airline routes, you can filter by an alliance, so in this case, we can see which airlines you could use your United miles on

(SEE ALSO: Introduction to Air alliances)
(SEE ALSO: [QUIZ] – Can you name the 27 Star Alliance alliance members?)

airline-route-mapper-india

Options

Airline Route Mapper has several different options that you can use. You can toggle whether or not you want to display codeshares, which can be useful when you’re wanting to see only flights actually flown and operated by a particular airline.

Another useful filter is being able to filter by distance. This can be useful when using a distance-based award chart like British Airways.  I used this when planning my trip to Europe.  I knew that we were going to be in London, and eventually going to Rome, so I wanted to find a city to visit in-between. Since British Airways flights costing less than 650 flown miles only cost 4500 Avios, I set a filter for 649 miles from London Heathrow

airline-route-mapper-distance-filter

Aha! How about Nice, France! So we booked our flights.

Development / updates

The one downside of Airline Route Mapper is that the data is a bit out to date. Of course airline schedules change all the time, so it can be hard to keep things up to date.

(SEE ALSO: Alaska’s adding 3 new non-stops… but not where I live! )

I am using the version from June 2014, which is over a year old. There actually is one version more current, but for some reason it is completely missing the Atlanta airport. Since ATL is one of the busiest airports in the world, that was causing me some problems, so that’s why I use the earlier version. There is talk on the Flyertalk thread of a community update, but so far that hasn’t happened.

Have you ever used Airline Route Mapper? Or do you know of a better tool? Let me know in the comments!


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