Everyone likes to travel, and there are tons of sites out there that will help you book and plan ahead for where you’re going. But what about where you’ve been? That’s where FlightMemory.com comes in. A friend of mine (and a pilot) introduced me to FlightMemory.com. It’s a simple idea really–where have I been?
Joining FlightMemory is easy and free (although they have premium options we’ll discuss later). You start by entering in your first flight. The first step is to enter in Airport codes (they have a lookup for those that don’t know them), the date and time of your travel. On the next screen you can enter all your detailed information such as: flight number, airline, aircraft type and even your seat number. There are even places to enter the registration number and aircraft name if you have that information. Convenient drop down menus for airline and aircraft that you’ve recently entered help so that you don’t have to sort through the big list every time. You have to enter flights one at a time, however, they do have an import feature if you want to go that way (for a fee).
One of the cool features they’ve implemented into the data entry portion is the rating system. You can rate your overall impression of the trip as well as your impression of the airport, airline and even the aircraft itself in a zero to five star format. It’s interesting to go back and look at that information in your list.
First step of entering in a flight.
Detailed flight entry
After you’ve entered in a few flights and have enough data for the system to digest, the statistics screen starts to get interesting. On this screen you can see all sorts of qualitative data mashed together such as total distances, total time, and the airports you frequent. They also give you two maps, one of the U.S. and one of the World that show all your flights. There are some fun stats on this page as well such as Earth Circumnavigation and distances to the Moon and the Sun. After just 4 round trips entered, I had almost enough miles to have circled the Earth once (0.78 x). Kinda cool.
Some stats after entering in a few flights.
FlightMemory has a few premium services too. The most prominent being that you can order a full color poster of all of your flights. For frequent flyers, this would be a cool piece to display. You can get a poster showing all your flights you’ve ever taken or maybe just in a single year, complete with some of the same numbers on your statistics screen. The posters range from $32 for a 12×18″ poster to $142 for a 32×48″ poster (plus S/H). Not bad considering the detail you get with it.
They also have a premium membership with a yearly fee of $39. With this membership you get upgraded features such as more detailed statistical information, a journeys tool for you to add in additional information such as rental car, trains, buses, etc., access to the mobile version of the site as well as other features like being able to send personal messages to other FlightMemory users, copy reoccurring trips and create PDF’s of your trips. Oh, and they remove all the ads for premium members too.
So far from my experience, FlightMemory.com is a pretty decent site. It has a ton of functionality for free and the premium plan they offer has enough extra features to warrant the price. The data it gives you is pretty cool and seeing how far you’ve gone all on one screen can be a bit overwhelming. One knock I have on the site though is that it stands alone as an application. As social media is booming, this site has no sharing tools at all. How cool would it be to be able to post your traveled miles this year or that you’ve almost made it half way to the moon on your Facebook or other social media profiles? I’m sure they’d get more traffic to the site and a hell of a lot of exposure that way.
Still, it is a cool site and I can’t wait to see how far I’ve traveled once I get all my flights in there. If you’re a user of the site, or try it out… come back here and post a comment to let me know. I’d love to see what others think of the site. Show of all your cool stats too!
My U.S. map after entering in four trips.
