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On weekends, I like booking cheap direct flights and flying to see a new city. However the number of direct routes from my airport is not that large and I'm always on the lookout for new destinations to pop up for booking.

Is there a website that can automate this for me and send me a notification whenever there are new direct flights from my local airport?

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    Part of the problem is defining what is a "new direct route". Is it an announcement, a scheduled flight, or an actual flight? All 3 of these will have vastly different methods of getting an answer.
    – Aaron
    Commented Apr 17, 2019 at 21:18

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By convention, the Wikipedia articles on airports include a table of airlines and (nonstop) destinations, which seems to get updated fairly promptly by avgeeks/crowdsourcing (and it includes upcoming service with the start date noted). First, you could simply check the article on your airport periodically. For automation, depending on your IT skills, you could program a script to download the page periodically and see if the table has changed. Or, you could use Wikipedia itself or another service to set up an email alert when the article is updated, and could even try to limit or filter the emails to when the destinations section is updated if there are a lot of noise updates.

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    you could use Wikipedia itself or another service to set up an email alert when the article is updated,, I've used followthatpage.com when I was looking for jobs.
    – gerrit
    Commented Apr 15, 2019 at 8:17
  • There are also some add-ons capable of tracking specific pages. Nothing I can recall from memory and probably outdated anyway, but a simple Google search should help with that.
    – Ister
    Commented Apr 15, 2019 at 12:03
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    You can make use of 'Watchlist' - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Watchlist , but this means you will get notified for every edits — it might be someone actually adding new data, committing vandalism, or just someone fixing the typo.
    – revi
    Commented Apr 15, 2019 at 12:17
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As a frequent traveller and maintainer of OpenFlights, I'd love it if there was such a thing, but I'm not aware of any such global service and up-to-date route/schedule data in general is pretty tightly locked down with copyrights.

What I do instead is subscribe to relevant blogs and news sites. Some random examples:

  • Australian Business Traveller keeps a close eye on flights to/from Australia.
  • Routes Online is a firehose of global updates, with tags that you can use to keep an eye on individual airlines and airports (example).
  • Most airports and regional aviation authorities also have news feeds that contain updates about new routes; for example, here's Finavia's news for Finland.
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  • Locked down with copyrights? Facts are not subject to copyright. The closest you might get are EU database rights, but their existence is directly due to the lack of copyright on facts. And that just means that in the EU you can't republish the whole database. The proposed "new destination service" would still be legal.
    – MSalters
    Commented Apr 15, 2019 at 7:18
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    @MSalters That may well be the case, but you still need to pay OAG/Innovata $X,000/month for access to their data, which they can turn off for any reason or no reason...
    – lambshaanxy
    Commented Apr 15, 2019 at 7:28
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Since you're interested in specific city the number of airports you're considering seems limited. You may check if they have some sort of a newsfeed/rss on the airport page. I may be wrong, but airports like to brag about any new routes they managed to attract to the airport so the info should be on their webpage. Check if they don't have a newsletter to sign up for.

Even if the answer is no, still all airports I have ever checked have a page for departures/arrivals schedule (not the next x, but the plan for the whole week). Use a tool to track changes on such pages. As mentioned in a comment to a different answer, there are browser add-ons (I used to use UpdateScanner for Firefox, I don't know if it is still working though) to do that.

Another option you may consider is looking for some newspapers regarding airliners or aviation. If there is anything local enough, they may be listing this kind of information (according to their publishing schedule, so probably once a month).

Either case you'll also get some extra junk but that you can rule out by using filters/rules in your mailbox. Changes tracking on the departures page is probably least vulnerable to false positives (i.e. you're notified when there's actually nothing interesting changed).

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One (not ideal) solution is to look at the list of the main airlines serving your airport, then look at these airlines' webpage on their new routes.

E.g., for SFO, https://www.flightconnections.com/flights-from-san-francisco-sfo mentions that:

Airlines flying from San Francisco. In total there are 44 airlines flying from and to San Francisco. Most flights are operated by one of the following carriers:

  • United Airlines (UA): 109 destinations
  • Alaska (AS): 37 destinations
  • Delta (DL): 9 destinations
  • American Airlines (AA): 8 destinations
  • Southwest Airlines (WN): 8 destinations
  • [...]

Then look at these airlines' webpages pertaining to their new routes.

However, as mentioned in another answer, the Wikipedia seems to be quite well updated, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport#Passenger

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