Do you know that even past flight information can be critical at desperate times? If you have missed your flights and now want to claim compensation or are facing a significant delay that has ruined your entire itinerary but want the airlines to compensate for your struggles, you need past flight information.
Your past flight information verifies your travel details and helps resolve disputes, track frequent flier miles, and maintain accurate travel records for personal or business purposes. But the question is, how can you find flight information for past flights?
Today, numerous ways exist to check and verify your flight details for your past travels. You can either reach out to your travel agency or airline services. You can check your email records. You can also go for flight-tracking websites and apps. These are just a few ways. This blog will discuss all these ways to find past flight information in detail. Read further to learn more.
Past flight information is critical not only to file compensation but also to numerous administrative tasks.
It helps confirm travel dates and details and ensures you are storing accurate personal and professional records.
Information about past flights is important for claiming travel expenses and filing flight delay compensations and flight cancellation refund.
If you want to leverage discounts or favorable payment terms as a frequent flier, you need to save all your past flight information. This will help you track your accumulated miles and ensure you receive and use benefits from loyalty programs.
Past flight information is crucial for insurance claims, fighting legal disputes with the airlines, or immigration purposes.
It helps you plan your future travels by reviewing past itineraries, identifying preferred airlines or airline services that caused you trouble, and optimizing travel experiences.
Finding past flight information is crucial if you want to file flight delay compensation claim with the airlines. It serves as proof of travel and validates if your flight was delayed or that you missed your connecting flight. The details in the flight data will assist the airlines or your travel agent confirm the length and the underlying reasons behind the delay and ensure that your claim fulfills all the required eligibility criteria for refunds.
Accurate past flight information is also essential if you want to pursue it in legal proceedings. In these proceedings, regulatory bodies would ask for proof to support your case effectively and streamline the claim process.
Past information about a flight helps to confirm that you had final reservations for a particular flight, and it was delayed. Airlines will use this as proof to verify whether you have traveled to your final destination.
The details of flight schedules, such as departure or arrival times, help verify the duration of the entire journey and the length traveled. Flight delay compensation heavily relies on the time and distance traveled as it determines the amount you would get as a refund. These records ensure that you have traveled at least the minimum distance as guided by EC261 rules and compiled with the eligibility criteria.
Compensation regulations mention specific conditions, such as the duration of the delay and extraordinary conditions, that exclude a passenger from the compensation benefit. Past flight information will help determine compliance with these criteria.
When submitting a compensation claim to airlines, you must attach precise and nuanced flight details. You must include information to avoid falling out of the benefits, and airlines will refuse to pay any compensation.
Using past flight information is essential for many reasons. It is beneficial when claiming flight delay compensation or filing for a flight cancellation refund. It helps verify travel dates, calculate flier miles, claim reimbursements, etc.
Various methods can help you access this information. You can contact the airlines directly to get detailed records. You can also check email confirmations in your inbox, which contain comprehensive flight details. If you are a frequent flier, your accounts on airline websites or browser calendars will also mark the details and show travel details in the history.
In addition, you can also review credit card statements that you might have used to book your tickets. Travel agencies can also provide you with the details if they maintain proper records in physical or digital format. The last is services like Click2Refund, which can help you coordinate with various stakeholders or give you the necessary ways to collect past flight information and also assist you in processing the data for your legal or compensation purposes.
The most straightforward way to get past flight information is to contact the airlines directly. Every airline has a dedicated customer help desk. The customer service team is always well-equipped to handle such requests and provides everything you need to know about your previous journeys. However, they might ask you for basic personal data like your passport number, frequent flier details, etc., to locate the past flight you had been searching for.
For example, if you traveled to Dubai from Frankfurt through Lufthansa, you could call their customer help desk and ask them to retrieve your itinerary details. You can also email their info desk, which is the official email mentioned on the Lufthansa website. You can also submit your details to fight refund agencies and retrieve basic flight information from their repository.
When communicating directly with the airlines, be very clear and transparent about why you need the information and what exactly you are looking for in those details. This will help make the process faster and smoother.
Numerous booking platforms help passengers book their trips. Booking.com, Thomas Cook, Skyscanner, Clear Trip, etc., are famous names that have recently become very popular. If you prefer using these booking platforms to book your flight tickets, these platforms are your place to search for your past flight information. All you have to do is log in, go to your travel history section, scroll through it, and collect the flight info you need. The section for ‘My Trips’ or ‘Booking History’ contains the list of your past travels in chronological order, giving a quick summary of dates, destinations, and other critical data.
When booking, a traveler usually has to either check out as a guest or create a personal account. This archive allows you to access your travel details anytime, anywhere, and very quickly, locating your past flight data. Basically, you can choose to forget, but your booking partners remember everything.
When you book tickets for a flight, you receive a booking confirmation in your email inbox, either from the booking agency or the airline services. This email usually includes your travel date, flight number, PNR number, destination details, departure and arrival times, terminals in the airport, and any other services you have purchased.
If you are looking to trace back to any particular flight, all you have to do is apply filters in your inbox search box and type either the date of your travel or the name of the agency or booking agency. Emails are the fastest and easiest way to find your flight information. There is no clutter of papers to dive into or hour-long conversation with the airline help desk or agency reception. You may also find a dedicated folder for flight notifications or airline emails to streamline the process.
The next source in the list is tracking websites and apps like FlightRadar24, which can be great for retrieving current and past flight information. These websites are dedicated sources for monitoring flight status. Many of these website services have extended their services to offering flight history. This can be especially useful for verifying and matching data when claiming flight cancellation or flight delay compensation.
For instance, these tracking websites will give you historical patterns of flight delays of a particular airline, letting the authorities examine whether their flights are constantly delayed, at what time the flight reached the original destination, by how many hours the flight was delayed, whether there was any connected flight relying on a particular flight, and so on. The data can be analyzed beyond trajectory, timings, etc.
These are very straightforward to use. You enter the flight name and date and follow the instructions. You will get the departure and arrival details along with other movement details. The extensive databases give detailed information on past flights and are a go-to source for tracing flights.
Apart from tickets and booking sites, passports always hold critical travel proof, especially if you are traveling internationally. Passports have stamps, annotations, immigration details, etc., that often offer deep insights into your past destinations and flights. When clubbed with visas and boarding passes, passports can help you put together the missing information from your past travel.
For instance, you are traveling to Qatar from Ataturk Airport on, say, 10th June 2024, with an exit stamp from Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, Istanbul (Turkey) on 22nd June 2024. This indicates a trip to Qatar from Turkey for that period. While not the most efficient way, passports can be tangible proof of your travel and its timelines.
If you want to use the past flight information for compensation or refund purposes, the best way is to leave it to professional refund experts like Click2Refund. Whether it's flight delay or cancellation, denied entry, or missed connection flight, the team with professional refund skills will help you retrieve all the necessary data from authentic sources. Not just that, they will also assist in filing compensation and leverage the available data in the best possible way to help you get the maximum amount.
How do you find flight information from the past? The best way is to build a repository for every flight detail. Here’s how you can do it.
Consider organizing all your flight confirmations and travel notifications in a separate, distinct folder and making sure it is easy to access across devices. This will help you locate booking details, itineraries, and any other information quickly without sifting through a cluttered inbox.
Numerous document apps, such as Microsoft Office Lens, Evernote, Digital Journal, etc., can help you store your flight tickets, boarding passes, and other critical travel documents digitally. These apps not only help organize your documents but also allow you to access them through any device, ensuring you have the travel details at your fingertips.
Consider keeping a dedicated travel diary or a planner notebook to record every travel-related transaction, including details on tickets and boarding passes. You can either do it manually in a hard-bind laptop, create a spreadsheet with tabs for all major-minor travel information, or download any journal application and segregate your information into monetary transactions, travel notifications itineraries, and other miscellaneous details. You use them later to reminisce about your trips or initiate other mission-critical actions like filing flight delay compensation.
We hope this blog helps you understand how to find past flight information. While there are many ways to trace back information for a past flight, checking emails, contacting booking platforms or airlines, or using tracking websites or APIs are some of the easiest ways to do it. Past flight information is especially critical if you seek compensation for a delayed flight.
Speaking of which, Click2Refund is the best solution for all your flight delay compensation needs. Our team of deep expertise will go through your case, help you collect all the required flight details, process them, file compensation, comply with regulatory requirements, and sort legal proceedings if required. In short, you get a hassle-free way to get your flight information and get the refund you deserve.
Want to know more about your flight compensation? Check out our 2-minute flight delay compensation calculator. No obligation.