Ask an airline for your entire flight history — with a template you can send

Airlines keep far more about you than they show you. The website's "my bookings" page goes back a year or two; the database behind it goes back much further.

There is a way to get at the rest, and it is neither a favour nor a support ticket. Under the GDPR — and the UK's near-identical version — anyone whose data a company processes can demand a copy of it. It is called a subject access request, it is free, and the airline has one month to respond.

For rebuilding a flight history, it is the heaviest tool available, and the one people never think to use.

When this works

It works for airlines established in the EU or UK — BA, Lufthansa, Air France, KLM, Ryanair, easyJet, Iberia, SAS, Aer Lingus, Wizz, and so on.

It also works, in principle, for non-EU airlines processing data about people in the EU or UK — which covers most large carriers selling tickets there. Enforcement is patchier; the email is still free to send.

If you are outside both, your position depends on local law. Several countries have comparable rights, and some airlines will simply send the data if asked politely, because arguing costs more than exporting a table.

What to ask for

The single biggest mistake is asking for "my data". You will get a PDF of your marketing preferences.

Be specific. You want the booking and travel history: sectors flown, dates, flight numbers, origins and destinations. Naming it in the request is what makes the difference between a useful answer and a form letter.

The template

Send this to the airline's data protection officer or privacy address. It is usually in the privacy policy, often as dpo@ or privacy@.

Subject: Subject access request — [your full name]

Dear [airline],

I am making a request under Article 15 of the UK GDPR / EU GDPR for a copy of the personal data you hold about me.

Specifically, I would like my complete booking and travel history, including for each flight: the date, the flight number, the origin and destination airports, and the booking reference.

My details are:

• Full name: [name]
• Date of birth: [date]
• Email addresses used for bookings: [list them all]
• Frequent flyer number, if any: [number]
• Approximate period: [e.g. 2008 to present]

Please provide the data in a commonly used electronic format such as CSV or Excel.

I understand this request is free of charge and that you must respond within one month. If you need anything further to verify my identity, please let me know promptly.

Yours faithfully, [name]

Two details that matter more than they look:

• List every email address you have ever booked with. Airline records are keyed on the booking, not on you. An address you stopped using in 2015 is a decade of flights they will otherwise never connect to your name.
• Ask for CSV or Excel explicitly. You have a right to a commonly used electronic format. Without asking, the default is very often a PDF that has to be retyped.

What comes back

Anything from a tidy spreadsheet to a forty-page PDF containing your travel history somewhere in the middle of it. Both are fine — you are mining it for three fields per flight, not reading it.

The good ones are startling. A decade of sectors with dates and flight numbers, including the trips you had entirely forgotten, is not unusual.

Expect it to take most of the month. Expect at least one airline to ask for identity verification first, which is legitimate — send what they ask for, and no more.

If they do not answer

They are required to. If a month passes with nothing:

1. Reply to the same thread, note the date of the original request, and say you are following up before escalating.
2. If that fails, complain to the relevant data protection authority — the ICO in the UK, or the supervisory authority of the country the airline is established in. Complaints are free, and the prospect of one resolves most of these.

Which airlines to bother with

Not all of them. Work out which carriers you flew most and request from those — three or four requests will typically recover the large majority of a history, and a request to an airline you flew twice in 2016 is not worth the month.

For everything those miss, the cheaper sources are your inbox and, if you have entered the US on a foreign passport, your I-94 travel history.

One thing worth saying plainly

This is a right, not an imposition. It exists precisely so that the record a company keeps about you is not solely theirs, and using it for something as harmless as rebuilding your own flight log is entirely within its spirit.

Orbit keeps your logbook on your device and exports it as CSV whenever you want it back. Download now.