Friday, September 5, 2014

The Best Flight Tracking Websites, Ranked and Reviewed


How many miles did you fly last year? What about different
airlines? Total number of hours spent in the air? If you can't answer
any of these questions, listen up because there's a slew of ways to
easily track all these fun travel statistics with only a few clicks of
the mouse.



Right now is the ideal time to begin logging your flights for
this fresh year so that, come December, you'll have all sorts of fun
stats to share at holiday parties and on social networks. "I flew 70,000
miles and visited 32 different airports in 9 countries this year" sure
beats, "Yeah, I traveled a lot."



With this is mind, we put flight tracking websites to the test:



FlightMemory:

Advantages:

· Full flight detail listing

· Ability to set region to track domestic flights easily

· Thorough flight stat calculations, including longest, shortest, slowest and fastest flights

· Online shop for aviation gifts and posters of your own travels for €29.95-149.95

· Significant network of frequent flyers

· Airline and airport rating system



Disadvantages:

· A lot of ads

· Cluttered homepage with 'dated' look

· Non interactive map

· Ability to import easily from OpenFlights only



FlightDiary:

Advantages:

· Aesthetically pleasing dashboard

· Full flight details are able to be uploaded

· Plenty of calculated stats, including carbon emissions, time in air, number of flights per month

· Auto-fill based on flight number

· Ad-free

· Massive database and frequent flyer community

· Ability to easily export to other databases

· Ability to import for free, but only from OpenFlights

· Interactive map that allows clicking with data retrieval

· Airline and airport rating system

· Fare-class tracking



Disadvantages:

· No airline logos

· Rare updates and new benefits

· Facebook linking is very minimal and only posts links to user profiles



JetLovers:

Advantages:

· Automatic social media connection and tracking by check-ins

· Ranking amongst social media connections

· Lots of levels with cute badges for bragging rights

· Color-coded airports depending on frequency

· Ad-free


Disadvantages:

· Reduced ability to manually log flights as it's mostly auto-logged from your social media check-ins

· Add flight depending on amount of 'friends'

· No airline, aircraft or flight number tracking

· Due to the automatic tracking by social media, a missed check-in or private flight won't get logged

· Slightly childish look to website




Pitot:

Advantages:

· Ability to import easily from OpenFlights and FlightDiary with duplicate detection

· Aesthetically pleasing dashboard

· Airline logos are included, which makes the flight history table look like an airport departures board

· Ability to store frequent flyer details and track via program

· Top 100 leaderboard for bragging rights

· Auto-fill from a massive database of airports and airlines

· In the map, flight paths are color-coded based on frequency of route as well as airline flown

· Features its own frequent flyer sub-communities with which to compete and create networks

· Ad-free

· Ability to track future flights

· For flights in the past 2 weeks, automatic auto-fill of details

· Fare-class tracking



Disadvantages:

· Not free, but €4.99 per month is not a bad price for one-stop shopping

· Still in alpha-testing, so not all features are 100% live

· No social media syncs



Note: Pitot is not fully live, but is in alpha testing. We've
been told that flyers who express early interest now may results in
added perks moving forward.




OpenFlights:

Advantages:

· Full flight detail tracking

· Top 10 leaderboard for bragging rights

· Substantial network of frequent flyers

· Simple data entry

· Interactive map with not only user's routes, but all airlines and routes from the airport



Disdvantages:

· Has ads

· Basic user interface

· Difficult importing directions



Winner:

It boils down to FlightMemory or FlightDiary,
depending on what stats you most enjoy or which site your friends give
their loyalty. We personally use FlightMemory, but are considering a
switch and Pitot sounds extremely promising. For frequent users of
Foursquare, however, there's nothing easier than JetLovers.

|| Jaunted

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