I’m an avid reader of the travel message boards on FlyerTalk, and was inspired awhile ago by a thread entitled “How Many Different Airlines Have you Flown.” It occurred to me that I could never compile such a list for myself because many of my travels happened when I was a young child. My parents’ memories have faded and the records are long lost, along with many of the airlines that have now gone under.
I decided it would be a great addition to my daughter’s baby book to log her air travels… track things like airlines flown, airports visited, dates of trips, etc. If she grows into an airline geek like me, she will want to know these details.
So, I put together a nifty spreadsheet that tracks the days she flew, her age at the time, the airlines used, the routings (starting and ending airport, as well as places where we changed planes), her travel companions, and the purpose of the trip. I plan to keep this spreadsheet updated regularly and print it at important intervals to include in her baby book. It looks something like this:
| Date | Age | Airport Routing(Stopovers in Parenthesis) | Airline | Traveling Companions | Purpose of Trip |
| July 2-July 11-July 25, 2009 | 3 months old | SFO to JFK JFK to ATL ATL to SFO | JetBlue Delta Delta | Mom & Dad | 1st airplane trip to visit family in AL and CT and attend christening. |
| September 17-20, 2009 | 6 months old | SFO to CLT CLT to SFO | US Airways | Mom | Visit Aunt L & Uncle D’s new home and see NC family. |
Putting it together was pretty easy, as I had all the electronic airline receipts in my Gmail account archives. I did have to remember to account for a couple of trips where our routing changed mid-trip (Little V has survived three flight cancellations, but we’ve luckily been traveling where we’ve been easily rerouted to other airports or airlines).
This spreadsheet allowed me to easily crunch the numbers. So, without further ado, here are our daughter’s latest travel stats:
Total trips flown: 18
(Includes 16 roundtrips plus 2 multicity jaunts)
Segments flown: 52
Airlines flown: 10
AirTran, Alaska, American, Continental, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, United, US Airways, Virgin America
(We are now pretty much out of major domestic commercial airlines to fly – the minors that remain are Hawaiian, Frontier, Allegiant, and Spirit.)
Airports visited: 17
ATL, BDL, CHS, CLT, DFW, ECP, IAH, JFK, KOA, LAS, MGM, OAK, ORD, RDU, SAN, SNA, SFO
Upcoming trips planned: 3
(Disneyland and CT in September and Virginia in October)
(These upcoming trips will add 2 more airports to her tally – IAD and CHO)
[…] the first posts I made on this blog when it launched in the summer of 2012 was about how you should track your tyke’s travels so that your child has a record of their jetsetting childhood one day. I traveled so much with my […]