About Route Grove: our editors and data sources

What this site is

Route Grove is an independent travel reference for budget-conscious flyers. We cover the things that actually move the cost of a trip: baggage rules, check-in cutoffs, lounge access, walk-in lounge prices, ground-transport options, and the relative value of secondary airports versus main hubs. We do not sell tickets and we do not have an affiliate stake in any airline.

Where the data comes from

Airport, airline, and route data on Route Grove is built from the OpenFlights airport, airline, and route databases (see openflights.org/data.php). Correction (2026-09-11): earlier text on this page and in the site footer described this data as "public domain." That was wrong. OpenFlights states plainly on its licensing page that "the OpenFlights Airport, Airline, Plane and Route Databases are made available under the Open Database License [ODbL 1.0]. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License [DbCL 1.0]" — both require attribution and share-alike licensing of derived works. (OpenFlights notes that some of the underlying source material — OurAirports/DAFIF airport data and Airline Route Mapper route data — is separately asserted public domain by those upstream projects, but the OpenFlights compilation itself is ODbL.) Route Grove's attribution: airport, airline, and route data from OpenFlights (openflights.org), used and redistributed under ODbL 1.0; this page and the site footer link back to the source on every page. OpenFlights also states it stopped actively developing the dataset in 2014 — it is a historical snapshot, not a live schedule feed, though the underlying GitHub file still receives occasional community corrections.

Methodology: the 2026-09-11 route augmentation

What we added. We downloaded OpenFlights' routes.dat (67,663 route records), airports.dat (13,768 records), and airlines.dat (6,162 records) directly from github.com/jpatokal/openflights on 2026-09-11 and joined them against Route Grove's own airport and airline pages by exact IATA/ICAO code match only (never by name).

Airports: all 3152 of Route Grove's airport pages matched a source-airport code in routes.dat — 100%, 0 unmatched. Each matched page's Routes, Destinations, and Airlines stat figures were recomputed directly from the current routes.dat and, where they differed from the previously published number, refreshed (327 Routes, 534 Destinations, and 371 Airlines figures changed). Every difference we found made the number go up, never down — consistent with routes.dat having a small number of routes added by the OpenFlights community since this site's original data pull, not with any error running the other direction. We also found that "Destinations" and "Airlines" had previously been the length of a capped top-list (25 and 20 items) mislabelled as if it were the page's total — that is now fixed to the real distinct count, and where the on-page list is still a capped top-N selection we relabelled the heading "Top …" to say so honestly. Each airport page now also carries a new "Routes from this airport" table listing every real destination code reachable from that airport in the dataset, grouped with the airlines that fly it (37073 destination rows across all airport pages, covering 67047 underlying route-airline records — a 1:1 accounting of every row in routes.dat whose source airport is one of ours).
Airlines: all 540 of Route Grove's airline pages matched an airline code in routes.dat directly — 100%, 0 unmatched. Each matched page's Routes and Destinations stat figures were refreshed the same way (93 Routes and 218 Destinations figures changed, again always upward). We deliberately did not touch the "Hubs" figure or number: the site's "Hubs" concept is a curated top-6 selection of an airline's busiest bases, which is a different, narrower idea than "every airport this airline originates any route from in routes.dat" (that literal count runs into the hundreds for large network carriers, because routes.dat lists both directions of most routes). Substituting one for the other under the same label would have replaced one imprecise number with a more precise-looking but conceptually wrong one, so we left the Hubs figure exactly as published and only relabelled the section heading "Top hub airports" where the grid was capped, to flag that it's a selection, not a total. Each airline page now also carries a new "Routes flown" table listing every real route (origin→destination pair) operated by that airline on file (66805 route rows across all airline pages, a 1:1 accounting of every routes.dat row for that airline).
Cities: for each of Route Grove's 3085 city pages we re-derived the aggregate "N airlines" / "N destinations" figures and the per-airport summary cards from the union of the (now-corrected) real data for that city's own constituent airports — not a separate dataset, just honest arithmetic over the airport-level fix above (586 airport summary cards updated across city pages; 561 city intro paragraphs and 561 city stat-tag rows changed). We checked every city's per-airport "routes" aggregate against the real dataset as instructed; the only source of drift found was the same routes.dat community-edit drift described above.

Fields we rendered: destination/origin airport IATA code, city, country (from OpenFlights' own airports table), and operating airline IATA/ICAO code, exactly as they appear in the source files. Fields we deliberately withheld: the Equipment (aircraft type) and Codeshare flag columns present in routes.dat — we don't have a verified way to expand aircraft-type codes against an authoritative source within this update, so we left them out rather than guess. We did not touch, validate, or newly "source" the pre-existing templated editorial prose on airport/airline pages (terminal, lounge, baggage, and check-in advice) — that content is unrelated to this dataset and is not made more or less reliable by this update.

We also refreshed the routes field in the site's own search-index.json (used by the on-site search box) so it matches the corrected per-airport figures above: 327 of 3,152 entries changed, 0 left unmatched.

Corrections: if you spot a wrong figure, an out-of-date route, or a licence-attribution problem, tell us the page URL, the field you believe is wrong, and (if you have one) a source, via the contact page.

How we write the guides

Long-form guides (baggage fee comparisons, carry-on size limits, lounge day-pass costs, ground-transport playbooks) are written by the Route Grove editors and updated periodically against the latest published carrier and airport policies. Carrier policies change frequently; always confirm with the airline before travel. The guides are intentionally practical: what you actually need to know to land cheap and avoid the gate-side surprise.

What we don't do

We do not book flights, sell insurance, run a loyalty programme, or take affiliate revenue from carriers. We do not publish sponsored content. The information on Route Grove is provided for general guidance only.

Contact

Spot a mistake or want a guide that doesn't exist yet? See the contact page for editorial email and how to report a data correction. Updates are pushed regularly based on the most recent OpenFlights data refresh.