How to reconstruct every flight you've ever taken

Most people start a flight log with the obvious problem: they have already taken a lot of flights, and they remember almost none of them.

This is fixable. Your flight history is scattered across half a dozen places you already have access to, and pulling it together takes about an evening. Here is the order to do it in, from highest yield to lowest.

1. Search your email

This is where most of the record lives, and it is the single most productive twenty minutes of the whole exercise.

Search your inbox — including archived mail, including the promotions tab — for:

• "booking confirmation" and "e-ticket"
• "boarding pass" and "check-in"
• "itinerary" and "flight confirmation"
• The names of airlines you know you've flown

Most airline confirmations include the route, the date and the flight number, which is everything you need. Sort by date and work backwards. If you've used the same email address for a decade, this alone will recover the large majority of your flights.

2. Go through your photos by location

Your phone's photo library is a location diary you did not know you were keeping.

Both iOS Photos and Google Photos let you browse by place. Open the map view, zoom out to the world, and look at the clusters. Each cluster is a trip, and each trip had flights at either end. The photo timestamps give you the dates; the fact that you were in Lisbon in April 2019 tells you there was a flight to Lisbon in April 2019.

This is particularly good at catching the trips your email missed — the ones booked by someone else, or on a travel agent's account, or through an employer.

3. Pull your loyalty statements

If you have a frequent-flyer account, the activity statement is a complete, dated, official record of every flight credited to it. Most airlines let you go back several years in the web interface, and their customer service will often supply a longer history on request.

Alliance accounts are especially useful, because a single Star Alliance or oneworld statement may cover flights on a dozen different carriers.

4. Check your passport stamps

Less useful than it used to be — the Schengen area, domestic flights and automated e-gates all leave no mark — but for long-haul travel outside your home region, an old passport is a dated, physical, indisputable record. Expired passports are worth digging out of the drawer for this alone.

5. Look at your bank statements

The last resort, and slow, but reliable. Search card statements for airline names. A charge from an airline on a given date almost always corresponds to a flight within the following few months.

What to record

For each flight you only genuinely need three things:

• Departure airport
• Arrival airport
• Date

Everything else — distance, duration, countries, continents, which milestones it triggers — can be derived from those three. Orbit computes all of it automatically from an offline database of 8,801 airports, so you are only ever entering the three facts you actually know.

Aircraft type, seat number and flight number are nice to have. They are not worth stalling the project over, and you can always add them later.

On being approximate

You will hit flights where you know the route but not the date, or the month but not the day. Log them anyway with your best guess.

A logbook that is 95% complete and slightly fuzzy on some dates is enormously more useful than one you never started because you couldn't verify a connection from 2011. The distance total — which is the number you actually care about — is unaffected by whether a flight was on the 14th or the 16th.

Do the long ones first

If you want the fastest sense of progress, start with the longest flights you remember. They contribute most of the distance, they are the most memorable, and they are the ones that unlock milestones.

Log five long-hauls and you may already have passed one lap of the Earth without adding a single short flight.

Then stop, and just log as you go

The reconstruction is a one-off. Once it's done, the ongoing cost of keeping a flight log is about thirty seconds per flight — which is roughly the amount of time you spend at the gate looking for something to do anyway.

Orbit works offline, so you can do the whole reconstruction on a plane. Download now.