The Free iPhone App That I Think Every Flyer Should Have

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There aren’t may non-Apple apps on my iPhone that I would consider indispensable but amongst the few that are is the MyFlights App – I love it.

MyFlights is a simple-to-use yet extremely useful app for keeping track of your flight bookings and it’s helped me out quite a bit in the past.

Form the outset I should stress that the app only works on iPhones & iPads (there’s a web app too) and is limited to airlines that use the Amadeus booking system (I’ll list the major airlines later). While this certainly limits the number of people who’ll get the most out of MyFlights there are still a lot of people out there who’ll benefit from using it.

Link to the MyFlights webpage

What Does MyFlights Do?

Per the developer:

MyFlights will constantly monitor your bookings, and if the airline make any changes (such as move you from your preferred seat, change the terminal you’ll be flying from, or maybe they forget your frequent flyer number) we’ll send you a Push Notification to your iPhone or iPad

In reality the app will alert you to even more.

I’ve benefitted from MyFlights letting me know that a flight time has changed, that an airline has swapped out an aircraft I thought I’d be flying and even that an upgrade had cleared.

Which Airlines Does MyFlights Work With?

If the airline uses Amadeus then MyFlights will be able to track your reservation.

The airlines that are likely to be of interest to TFM readers are:

• Aegean Airlines
• Air France
• ANA
• Asiana
• Avianca
• British Airways
• Cathay Pacific
• EL AL
• Finnair
• Korean Air
• LATAM
• Lufthansa
• Norwegian
• Qantas
• Qatar Airways
• Singapore Airlines
• Southwest Airlines

Here’s a link to the full list of airlines who currently use Amadeus

Importantly, even if only part of your reservation is with an airline that uses Amadeus, MyFlights will still be able to track your reservation.

For example:

American Airlines doesn’t use Amadeus but, if I have a British Airways connection somewhere in my itinerary, MyFlights will still track my reservation because the reservation gets shared with Amadeus thanks to the BA involvement in my trip.

How Can MyFlights Help?

I can only speak from personal experience but, when I had an issue with Qatar Airways’ scheduling earlier in the year, it was MyFlights that alerted me to the fact that the airline seemed to be playing around with the departure times.

This is how a flight time change appears in MyFlights

More recently MyFlights helped me out with an American Airlines aircraft swap.

I received an email alert from the app telling me that something had changed….

…and when I looked into it I could see that American had changed the aircraft on two of my transatlantic flights:

That may not seem like that big of a deal….but it was.

I had reserved an exit row seat when I first booked my flight but the exits are in different rows on the 777-300 and the 777-200. When the aircraft swap took place I was relegated to a regular Economy Class seat.

When I saw the alert from MyFlights I went straight to my booking and re-selected an exit row on the new aircraft – at least when my upgrade inevitably fails to clear I’ll still have a little bit of room 🙂

Airlines don’t generally alert you when there has been a change of aircraft so, had MyFlights not alerted me, there’s every chance that I wouldn’t have noticed the change until the exit row and main Cabin Extra seats had been reserved by other flyers.  That could have put me in a seat with just 31″ of legroom on a 10+ hour flight!

Seat dimensions on American’s 777-200 aircraft

In this instance MyFlights would also have helped me out had I been booked into First Class – the 777-300 has a First Class cabin while the 777-200 has not – so I would have had a very timely alert that I had just been downgraded.

I’m often surprised at the level of detail MyFlights can pick up and I was especially surprised when the app alerted me to the fact that Joanna and I had chosen our meals on a recent Singapore Airlines flight:

I’m not going to claim that this is crucial information….but it does show just what level of information the app has access to and can track.

Bottom Line

There are a whole host of other features that come with the free app (like viewing all your bookings, viewing your past bookings and tracking your whole flight history) but the key to this app is it’s simplicity to use (you only need your booking reference and your surname to get started) and it’s ability to track changes to your reservations.

There are paid upgrades you can go for which offer in-depth options….

….but I can’t really tell you more about those as I don’t use them – MyFlights Basic is good enough for me and I’m not really sure what I’d do without it.