Finding flights that do NOT stop in the USA

Question

I'm trying to find flights between New Zealand and Tijuana, Mexico that do NOT stop in the USA, however the flight searches I've been doing all seem to have a stop somewhere in the US - LAX, SFO, IAH are the most common. Is there a way to do a flight search to force it to not include stops in the US?

I tried with the ITA Matrix but couldn't get that to do what I wanted (either it can't be done, or more likely I'm not setting up the search correctly)

How can I find flights that exclude stops in the USA?

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Edit for clarity

I am New Zealand citizen, permanent resident of Mexico, and am not trying to avoid the US for legal reasons. Just trying to find alternative routes home after visiting family in NZ.

Answer 1

I found two options

It looks like the best option would be going with Latam through Santiago de Chile to Mexico City. One ways on October are around $800. You can actually book directly to Tijuana but that's insanely expensive so you are way better off buying MEX->TIJ as a separate ticket.

Emirates through Dubai and Barcelona to Mexico City also works, but is a longer flight and more expensive.

This is a tricky search: I used flightconnection.com to do a map based search for possible airlines starting in Mexico City and then checking with the airline directly

EDIT

You can setup this search in ITA Matrix by excluding the connecting airports (example ~SFO,LAX,DFW,IAH,JFK) and using MEX as the destination. This produces the LATAM option but not the Emirates one. There is also apparently an ANA option through Narita and Air Canada through Vancouver. If you want to avoid a Visa, Canada is not going to help either.

Answer 2

You can try using Google Flights and filter by the airport type, if those are located in the United States. For example here's how I did this for a random date, and assuming an Auckland departure:

However, nothing shows up. It may just be the case that such flight options do not exist, at least for the specific date ranges.

You may thus want to take a look at flights that are known not to be listed on Google Flights, such as certain low-cost carriers. You can also try searching on other websites, such as Kayak, where you can also filter:

Again, however, there is no guarantee that such a flight route exists.

Answer 3

In general when you do this,

one approach that may help is simply ...

start backwards from the destination.

https://www.flightconnections.com/flights-from-tijuana-tij

You instantly learn that you will have to fly via Mexico City

Do the same "from" Mexico City

https://www.flightconnections.com/flights-from-mexico-city-mex

Finally do the same "from" Auckland

https://www.flightconnections.com/flights-from-auckland-akl

and you have your answers. Either Tokyo or Santiago.

(Or Vancouver, but I assume you wanna avoid entanglements and US flyovers.)

Note that you now know, for a fact, there are only two possible solutions to the flight you desire - and that's that.

Unfortunately, for those "2" possibilities, you just have to check if they exist under a single, or any, airline booking. Every flight site, eg Expedia, allows you to check this (set the stopovers / multi-destination / whatever), or at worst just call the "first" airline and see if they happen to book it through as one.

On a flight problem as obscure as yours, that is how it's gonna be. Awesome challenge!

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Another simple site for doing this: https://www.flightsfrom.com/TIJ

Answer 4

New Zealand and Tijuana, Mexico

How can I find flights that exclude stops in the USA?

Let's start getting from Australia/New Zealand to the continent. Google Flights can search non stop Auckland - South America flights and shows the only flight existing is into Santiago, quite a way from Mexico. It can also search for Auckland - Central America but that comes back empty. But alas, this is the only way if you want to avoid North America. If you move the map around, Vancouver also shows up:

Via Santiago it's 10 095 miles, via Vancouver, it's 9492 miles. That's not a significant difference -- but both add a sizable distance to the 6800 miles between Auckland and Mexico City but what can one do? You can test with the Great Circle Mapper that any major hub elsewhere is even worse: Tokyo is over 12000 miles, the rest like Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai is over 15 000 miles.

That established, while Wikipedia in general is not a reliable source to say the least, airports are neutral enough that not much trolling is going on so it's a reasonable good resource for this sort of research. We can look at the Tijuana airport article and find this curious tidbit:

International service ended in early 2020 (due to COVID-19 pandemic) after Hainan announced the cessation of all flights to Mexico.

So we will need to transfer within Mexico, no matter what. For connection, Mexico City is the evident choice, it is an extremely large airport -- the 16th busiest in the world.

You can try searching for flights transferring in Vancouver or Santiago first and in Mexico City second. Or you can even make the second connection point "anything" in hopes it'll find some other point than Mexico City (it doesn't):

Or you can buy two tickets. When flying on an unprotected connection, especially with flights this long and expensive always presume you will be bumped to the next flight and buy the connecting ticket correspondingly. Spend a night in the connecting city, in other words.

So fly to Vancouver or Santiago, sleep there and then fly to Tijuana via Mexico City. I would prefer this even if I had a single ticket because the first leg is just brutal and a shower and a bed is very, very enticing after such a long flight.

Also, as a small footnote, Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world but I might be slightly biased in this.