How to Log Every Airport You Pass Through

Most people can name the countries. Almost nobody can name the airports.

Ask a well-travelled friend how many airports they have passed through and you get a shrug and a number that is usually low by half. Layovers are the reason. Ninety minutes in Doha does not feel like being somewhere — you never left the terminal, you ate something beige, you boarded again. But you were there, and if you are keeping a record of where you have been, leaving it out makes the record wrong.

This is a practical guide to building that list from nothing, including the flights you took years ago and half-remember. It also sets out honestly what an airport log is good for, and where ours falls short.

Why the list does not already exist somewhere

The reasonable assumption is that this information is sitting in a system already and you just need to go and collect it. Mostly, it is not.

Your airline account only knows its own flights. A loyalty statement is a billing history for one carrier or one alliance. The budget hop you booked directly, the flight your employer put on a corporate account, the leg you took on a partner airline eleven years ago before you had the account — none of that is there. Most programmes also show a rolling window rather than the whole history.

Your inbox is a search problem, not an archive. The confirmations exist, but they are scattered across a decade, written by forty different systems, in three languages, under subject lines that changed format every couple of years. You can mine it — we will get to how — but it is not a list, and it will never turn itself into one.

Apps end. In September 2024, App in the Air, for years the default companion app for frequent flyers, announced it was closing. Users got an export window that ran to 17 October 2024, and then the export feature disappeared along with everything else (World Traveller 73, Tech for Travel). Around the same period Google began moving Maps Timeline off its servers and onto individual phones; by default it kept only the most recent three months on the device, and a number of people lost years of location history outright (Malwarebytes, GSMArena). We wrote about what that means for automatic capture in A Travel App That Doesn't Follow You. The expense app Trail Wallet went the same way, which we covered in our piece on where its users went next.

The lesson is not "avoid apps". It is that a history you never deliberately wrote down, in a place you can export from, is a history on loan.

What an airport entry actually needs

Three things. That is the entire model, and resisting the urge to add more is what makes the job finishable.

• Which airport. The airport, not the city. London has six. Both Milan airports are an hour from Milan.
• What kind of visit. Departure, arrival, or layover.
• When. The date, or your best approximation of it.

The visit type is the field people are tempted to skip, and it is the one that pays off. A layover count is the honest measure of how much of your flying is spent connecting rather than arriving — the proportion is usually higher than anyone expects, and it is the single most surprising number that falls out of a completed airport log. It also separates the airports you genuinely know from the ones you have only ever seen between gates B and D.

The method

Start with what you remember. Do not open anything. Write down every airport that comes to mind unprompted, with a rough year. Most people produce twenty to forty in ten minutes, and that is the bulk of the work done before you have opened a single file.

Then work the sources, in this order. Each one is cheaper than the one after it:

1. Boarding passes in your email. Search for the phrase "boarding pass", then each airline you have flown by name, then "check-in". Airport codes appear in the subject line more often than you would think.
2. Loyalty statements. Cheap for the carriers you actually fly, useless for the ones you flew once.
3. Your photo library, by date. The first or last photo of any trip is very often a gate, a wing, or a departures board. If your photos carry location data, the album's own map will show you the airports directly.
4. Passport stamps. Only for entry and exit, and only where stamps are still given, but they are dated and unambiguous.
5. Your calendar. Old flight events survive far longer than you would expect.

Accept approximate dates. A log with "roughly March 2016" is enormously more useful than one that was never finished because you would not guess. Log the airport with your best date and move on. You can correct it later; you cannot correct an entry that does not exist.

Do one year per sitting. The backlog is what kills this job. Work backwards a year at a time and stop when you get bored. The list keeps.

Doing it in MapMyWorld

Open the Airports page and choose Add Airport. Search by airport name, IATA code, or city — for example "Heathrow", "LHR", or "London" — pick the airport, set the visit type to departure, arrival, or layover, add the date, and save. That is the whole loop, and it takes a few seconds per airport once you are in a rhythm.

Two things then happen without you asking. The airport appears as a pin on your map, named for the airport with its IATA code, so your flying shows up in the same picture as everything else you have recorded. And if you already had a place saved within about half a kilometre of that airport, the two are linked together rather than duplicated.

Trips carry their own airports as well. When a trip has an origin, destination, or layover airport set, those show up in your airport list labelled with the trip they came from, without being counted twice against airports you added by hand. Cancelled trips are left out.

The page keeps a running count of departures, arrivals, layovers, and distinct countries, each of which doubles as a filter, so you can see every layover you have ever had, or every airport in Japan, in one click. There are three airport milestones in the achievement set — Frequent Flier I, II, and III, at ten, twenty-five, and fifty airports.

Where our airport log falls short

Worth knowing before you spend an evening on this:

• One entry per airport, ever. Six trips through Dubai is one Dubai entry. This is deliberate — the list answers "have I been here" rather than "how many times" — but if you want a per-flight history, this is not that, and adding the same airport again returns a duplicate error.
• Search does not match ICAO codes. Airport name, IATA code, and city only. Type EGLL and you get nothing; type LHR or Heathrow and you get Heathrow. The ICAO code is stored on the record, just not searchable. That will annoy pilots, and they are right to be annoyed.
• There is no bulk import. No file upload, no inbox scan, no connected airline account. You type them in. That is the same trade we make everywhere else: nothing arrives in your record without you putting it there.
• The CSV export covers your places, not your airport entries. If exporting the airport list itself matters to you, that gap is real today.
• The Free plan holds ten airports. Pro removes the ceiling, at $7.99 a month, $59.99 a year, or $199.99 once.

What you get back

The three-letter code system allows 17,576 possible combinations, and airlines have been assigning them since the 1930s (Wikipedia). You will use a vanishingly small fraction of them, and that is the point: the specific forty or eighty you have actually stood in are a genuinely personal map, and one that no other measure of travel captures. Country counts hide the flying entirely. Photo albums record the destinations and skip the connections. The airport list is the only one that shows the shape of how you got there.

Once it exists it also answers questions on demand — which countries you have only ever been to airside, which airport you return to most, how many countries your flying has touched versus how many you have properly visited. If you want to see how the airports in a given country are laid out before you start, our country airport guides are open to everyone. And if you are weighing this against other ways of keeping a travel history, we compared the options honestly in our review of the apps built for travel history.

Start with three airports you are certain about. The rest follows more easily than you expect.