How to find every flight you've taken in your Gmail

If you have used the same email address for a few years, your inbox is already a complete flight log. It just isn't sorted, and about a third of it is sitting in Promotions where you have never looked.

This is the highest-yield twenty minutes in the whole business of rebuilding a flight history. Here is how to do it properly, rather than by scrolling.

Search everything, not just the inbox

Gmail's default search skips spam and trash. Airline mail from 2013 has often been auto-archived, filtered, or swept into Promotions, so start every search with:

in:anywhere

That one operator typically doubles the results.

The searches worth running

Run these in order. Each catches a different shape of confirmation email.

1. The booking language. Airlines are unimaginative, which helps:

in:anywhere ("booking confirmation" OR "e-ticket" OR "itinerary" OR "boarding pass")

2. The check-in reminders. These often survive when the booking email has been deleted, because they arrive later and get archived rather than binned:

in:anywhere ("check-in is now open" OR "you're checked in" OR "online check-in")

3. The booking reference. Every PNR is six characters, letters and digits. You cannot regex in Gmail, but you can search the phrase that introduces it:

in:anywhere ("booking reference" OR "confirmation code" OR "reservation code" OR PNR)

4. By airline. Once you have a sense of who you have flown, go carrier by carrier. Sender search is far more reliable than subject search:

in:anywhere from:(ba.com OR lufthansa.com OR ryanair.com OR easyjet.com)

Add the ones you recognise. This is the search that finds the flights the generic phrases missed, because low-cost carriers write their subject lines differently from everyone else.

5. The aggregators. A large share of bookings never come from the airline at all:

in:anywhere from:(booking.com OR expedia.com OR kayak.com OR opodo.com OR edreams.com OR skyscanner.net OR kiwi.com)

6. Anything with a PDF. Older airlines attached the ticket rather than inlining it:

in:anywhere has:attachment filename:pdf (flight OR airline OR ticket)

Work backwards, one year at a time

A decade of results in one list is unusable — you lose your place, and you cannot tell what you have already recorded. Bound each search to a year instead:

in:anywhere "booking confirmation" after:2019/01/01 before:2020/01/01

Then move the window back. Twelve months at a time is small enough to finish in a sitting and large enough to feel like progress.

What to write down

Three fields per flight, and no more:

• Where from
• Where to
• When

That is genuinely all a logbook needs. Distance, flying time, countries, continents, and every milestone are all derivable from an airport pair and a date — Orbit computes them from an offline table of 8,801 airports, so the only things you ever type are the three you actually know.

Flight number and aircraft type are nice. They are not worth opening a second tab for, and you can add them later if you ever care.

The traps

Cancelled flights. A booking confirmation is not evidence that you flew. Anything from 2020 and 2021 especially needs a second look — check for a later cancellation or refund email before recording it.

Return legs. Most confirmations cover two flights, sometimes four. It is easy to log the outbound and forget the way home, and the way home is exactly as many miles.

Connections. "London to Auckland" in an itinerary is two or three flights. Log the legs, not the journey — otherwise the distance is wrong and the airports are missing.

Someone else's booking. Work trips and family holidays are often booked on an account that is not yours. Email will not find these. Your photo library and passport will.

When Gmail runs out

It will. Most people recover 70–90% of their history this way and then hit a wall — an old address, a deleted account, a decade before you used email for travel at all.

That is the point to switch sources rather than to keep grinding. Loyalty statements are the next-best record, and for anyone who has entered the United States on a foreign passport, the I-94 travel history is a free, official, dated list of arrivals and departures going back years.

Orbit derives the distance, hours and countries from the three fields you type, and works offline while you do it. Download now.