Flighty's New Connection Assistant Could Save Your Award Booking Sanity

If you've ever booked a self-transfer on Avios or stitched together a multi-carrier award itinerary through an unfamiliar hub, you'll know the real risk usually isn't the flight itself - it's the connection. Flighty has just gone further on that front with a big update to its Connection Assistant feature, and it's worth a proper look if you're the type to book creative routings rather than simple point-to-point flights.

Flighty already had a Connection Assistant that rated your layover as relaxed, normal, tight or risky based on historical connection time data. What's new this time is Gate Predictions - Flighty is calling this an industry first, and it forecasts your arrival and departure gates (or at least a gate range or concourse) from the moment you add a flight, based on historical data for that route. On the day itself, the app says predictions sharpen further, right down to the exact gate.

Alongside that, Connection Assistant now builds out a proper step-by-step guide for your specific connection: whether you'll need to clear passport control, recheck a bag, go through security again, or switch terminals, plus typical timings for each checkpoint. It tailors instructions to your passport too, so it'll tell you if you can use e-gates or skip immigration entirely, and it factors in your seat or booking class when estimating timings. Worth flagging early: Flighty is iOS only, and the deeper features (including Connection Assistant) sit behind a Flighty Pro subscription.

This is genuinely useful territory if you do multi-carrier award routings, the kind where you've pieced together a long-haul into a oneworld or Star Alliance partner short-hop yourself rather than letting one airline sort it. Minimum connection times published by airlines are often optimistic, and on a self-transfer itinerary you're carrying the connection risk yourself, so anything giving you a realistic read on timing before you commit to a booking is worth having in your back pocket.

It reminds me a bit of my own tier point run through Abu Dhabi and Jakarta a while back - some of those connections were tight enough that I found myself mentally rehearsing the walk from arrival gate to departure gate before I'd even landed. A tool that could have told me in advance whether I'd need to clear security again in Abu Dhabi, or whether my gate was likely to be a five minute walk or a twenty minute trek, would have taken a fair bit of the guesswork out of it.

If you're building a multi-carrier routing from scratch, our Award Travel Finder tool is a good starting point for checking live Avios and miles pricing across programmes before you commit to a hub. And once you've got an itinerary booked, it's worth sanity-checking the connection itself rather than just trusting the minimum connection time on the ticket.

Connection Assistant is a nice complement to some of the free tools we point readers towards already. If you want to check live queue times at a specific airport before you build in a buffer, our Flight Queue tool covers security and passport control waits, including live data for London Heathrow and Dublin. And if the connection is tight and you're weighing up whether to duck into a lounge or just make a run for the gate, our lounge access finder is worth a quick check too, so you know what's actually available airside before you decide.

It's also worth reading alongside our recent piece on what to use now SeatGuru has closed - between seatmap tools, queue trackers and now sharper connection guidance, the toolkit for self-managing a complex itinerary has quietly got a lot better over the past year or so.

None of this replaces good judgement - if a connection looks tight on paper, it's still on you to build in a buffer or pick a different routing. But Flighty turning "is this connection theoretically possible" into "here's exactly what this connection involves" is sensible product design, and it's the sort of feature that pays for itself the first time it saves you a sprint through an unfamiliar terminal. Connection Assistant is live now for Flighty Pro users on iOS.

Jack