How long does it take to get anywhere?
Pick any starting city and see the door-to-door travel time to every country on Earth — drive to the airport, wait, fly (with a connection when the route needs one), land, and reach the far city. Change your origin and the whole map re-computes. Nothing is pre-baked to one place, so drop your start pin anywhere and watch the world re-color.
Door-to-door time
✈️ Found a trip? Compare what your salary is worth once you land
Remote Work Relocation →What this shows, and what it doesn’t
This is a transparent travel-time model, not a flight search. It answers one question — roughly how long does the whole door-to-door trip take from a given starting point — and it answers it for the entire map at once. That is something a booking site can’t do: you can price one route on Google Flights, but you can’t see the shape of the whole world from your doorstep. That shape is the point. From New York, Europe is a comfortable overnight and Australia is a two-calendar-day haul; move your origin to Singapore and the map turns inside out.
Because it’s a model, treat the numbers as realistic ballparks, not booked itineraries. There are no live schedules, seat availability, or seasonal routes in here — the estimate is built from geography and a few honest assumptions about how flying actually works. The relative picture (which places are near, which are far, where the big jumps are) is far more reliable than any single number to the minute.
How the estimate is built
Every number is computed live in your browser from a curated list of 182 real airports and the great-circle distances between them. There is no server and no API call — change the origin and the whole map re-runs instantly. The door-to-door time for any trip is the sum of five honest pieces:
- Drive to the airport. From your start point to the nearest airport, at highway-ish speeds with a small fixed overhead for parking and getting to the gate.
- Airport buffer. Check-in and security before departure — about 1.6 hours for a short domestic hop, 2.5 hours when the flight crosses a border.
- The flight. Block time estimated from great-circle distance using a piecewise speed curve (short hops average slower; long hauls faster). Trips too long for any nonstop connect through the best available hub, with a layover added.
- Arrival. Deplaning, immigration on international arrivals, and baggage.
- Drive from the arrival airport to the destination city.
Driving competes with flying for nearby trips on the same landmass: under roughly 600 km, a door-to-door drive can beat the airport rigmarole, and the map shows whichever is faster. The country layer colors each nation by the time to reach its main gateway city; the gradient layer samples a grid of points across land so you can see the falloff inside large countries, not just between them.
Known limits
A model this simple has clear edges, and we’d rather name them. It flies nonstop from your nearest airport whenever the distance allows, which can be optimistic for small regional airports that don’t actually have long-haul service. It doesn’t know about visas, ferries, border closures, or the one weird seasonal route that would save you three hours. And a single gateway point per country flattens big places — use the gradient view when that matters. What it does well is the comparative shape of the world from wherever you stand, which is exactly what no single fare quote can show you.
Sources
- Country & coastline geometry: Natural Earth 1:110m public-domain boundaries, via the world-atlas TopoJSON build.
- Airport coordinates: curated from public airport reference data (IATA locations).
- Flight-time curve & buffers: NumberBench block-time model, calibrated to typical published gate-to-gate times.
A transparent comparative estimate — not a fare quote, schedule, or booking tool. It shows where the world is near and far from a starting point; real trips vary with airline, season, and connections.
Frequently asked questions
Can I start from anywhere, not just big cities?
Yes. Type any city in the search box, or hit the “Pick on map” target button and click anywhere — a beach, a mountain, the middle of a country. The model finds the nearest airport to that exact point and computes everything from there. Big cities are just the labeled shortcuts.
Why does it sometimes route through a hub?
When two airports are farther apart than any nonstop flight can cover, the trip has to connect. The model picks the hub that minimizes total flying time and adds a layover. For most trips under about 15,000 km it assumes a nonstop, which is why very long thin routes can look a touch optimistic.
Are these real flight times I can book?
No — it’s a distance-based estimate, not a schedule. Use it to understand which places are near and far from your starting point and roughly how big each trip is, then price the actual route on a booking site. The comparative picture is reliable; the exact minutes are a ballpark.
Why is the map colored in bands instead of exact times?
Bands (under 3 hours, 3–6, and so on up to 24 hours-plus) make the shape of reachability readable at a glance, which is the whole point of a map. Hover any country or city for its exact modeled time and the route it takes.