While most of you know that I absolutely love to travel, you might not know that I’m sort of a hoarder. See, I love collecting things from my various trips. I love collecting things because I can look back and remember the terrible incredible times I’ve had when traveling. It’s especially fun to look back through an entire year of travel. I can go flight by flight to see my year as I worked toward my goal of reaching top-tier elite status.
The thing is, that while I like collecting things, my apartment is quite small. As a result I opt to collect things that don’t take up much space. In addition to my rather small apartment, I also usually only travel with a carry-on. As you’d imagine that means when I’m on the road my bags is usually completely full. I simply don’t have enough room in my suitcase or backpack to bring bag large souvenirs.
I Started Collecting Physical Boarding Passes
My solution to this problem is to collect boarding cards from every flight I take. In fact, you might not know this, but I’ve collected a boarding card from every flight I’ve taken since about 2015! Yep, that’s just under 3 years of boarding cards. As you can see, the pile continues to grow each year and with each trip I take.
Each time I boarded a flight I would walk up to the gate agent and request a boarding card. I usually say that my phone is about to die and I’m worried about the mobile pass not working. A few moments later the gate agent requests to see my ID and prints out a boarding card. Yes, I know, this must be annoying, but I think it’s a very fun way to keep track of where I’ve been.
It Was Time To Digitize My Collection Of Boarding Cards
In the past, every time I’ve added a boarding card to the pile I’ve thought to myself about digitizing my collection. I’ve wanted to do this for two reasons. First, simply, I’m worried about my collection of boarding cards getting ruined. Who knows, it could be (another) apartment fire, or a move, or a flood, but one way or another I’m afraid of losing my collection of boarding passes.
Secondly, you might not know this, but many boarding cards are printed on thermal paper. While airlines prefer thermal paper because it is inexpensive and lightweight I hate it. I don’t like thermal paper because over time the ink printed on the card fades. That makes it particularly difficult to read and over time the ink disappears altogether. For that reason I’ve decided to digitize my collection of boarding cards before it’s too late.
Additionally, I wanted to digitize my collection of boarding cards because I wanted to see a map of where I’ve been. I figured it would be interesting to see what airports I’ve been to, visited most, and fly between most often. With that I decided to upload my collection of boarding cards to a website called “FlightMemory.”
My FlightMemory Results
After uploading all of my flights into a map I could easily generate a map of all the places I’ve been. That map looked like this.
The international version of my flight map looked like this.
I really like being able to see all of my flights depicted like this. Even more interesting were all the statistics that FlightMemory can provide. For starters you can see how far you’ve flown and an estimate of how much time you’ve spent in the air.
Next you can see which airports you’ve been to the most, which airlines you most frequently fly with, and which route you most often fly.
Some of this data is quite incomplete such as the Aircraft Type field.
What’s really cool about FlightMemory is that you can put in additional data about each flight. You can add the aircraft type, tail number, flight number, and relevant comments. All of that data is then archived and can be queried. Going forward I’ll try to add more data about each flight so my statistics page is more complete.
Final Thoughts
So far I’m a big fan of FlightMemory. It’s cool to have a single place with all of my past flight information. Also it was fun entering all of the data into the system and noticing things or patterns that I hadn’t noticed in the past. For example, I had no idea just how many time I’ve flown to Denver in the past few years. I also didn’t realize that I’ve been to London Heathrow 16 times (8 trips) in the past three years! That’s impressive considering my love/hate relationship with the airport.
I look forward to adding future flights to my FlightMemory, but will continue to add boarding cards to my collection. Even though I now have a way to digitally track my flights I still really enjoy collecting boarding cards. Going forward I will keep collecting boarding cards, but will then make sure to add each trip to my FlightMemory.
