The Best Airports to Connect Through to Europe

A connection is the cheapest fare on 858 of the 888 routes we priced. Which makes "where do I change planes" one of the largest decisions on a transatlantic booking, and one almost nobody publishes numbers on.

We can, because our carrier grid records the connecting airport on every fare. So for each route we took the cheapest fare available, and where it connected, recorded where.

Economy: the busiest hub is the most expensive one

Connect at	Routes won	Median winning fare	Cheapest	Whose hub
LHR	144	$908	$695	British Airways
IST	102	$849	$702	Turkish Airlines
KEF	88	$693	$474	Icelandair
CPH	77	$721	$422	SAS
FRA	57	$872	$540	Condor, Discover Airlines, Lufthansa
LIS	55	$676	$530	TAP Air Portugal
CDG	36	$857	$744	Air France
AMS	26	$881	$602	KLM
CMN	20	$708	$564	Royal Air Maroc

Heathrow won more routes than any other connecting airport and produced the most expensive winning fares of any significant hub. 144 routes at a $908 median, against Lisbon's $676 and Keflavik's $693.

That is not a contradiction. It is what happens when one airline sells almost everywhere: British Airways is frequently the only connecting option priced on a route, so it wins by default rather than on price. Reach and value are different things, and the hub table separates them more cleanly than anything else in our data.

Read the column that matters. If your itinerary routes through Heathrow, the question worth asking is not whether the fare looks reasonable — it is whether a Lisbon or Keflavik routing exists on your dates, because on the routes where both were priced the second one was several hundred dollars cheaper.

Business: the same table, an enormous gap

Connect at	Routes won	Median winning fare	Cheapest	Whose hub
KEF	160	$3,098	$2,068	Icelandair
IST	143	$4,826	$4,003	Turkish Airlines
LHR	115	$7,145	$4,653	British Airways
FRA	41	$5,391	$3,869	Condor, Discover Airlines, Lufthansa
LIS	40	$4,220	$3,270	TAP Air Portugal
CPH	35	$5,923	$4,332	SAS
AMS	27	$5,995	$4,451	KLM
CDG	27	$7,271	$4,952	Air France
CMN	20	$4,439	$3,796	Royal Air Maroc

In business the pattern sharpens into the single largest spread in our data.

Keflavik won 160 routes — more than any other hub in either cabin — at a $3,098 median. Heathrow won 115 at $7,145. That is a $4,047 difference for the same journey, in the same week, with a change of plane either way.

Icelandair's business cabin is a recliner, not a lie-flat bed, and that is the honest caveat on the number: you are not buying the same product. But $4,047 buys a great many things, and our cabin reviews score every business seat we have verified per aircraft so you can decide what the difference is actually worth to you. It is a decision, not a default — which is the whole argument of this site applied to one column of a table.

Two of the best are not in Europe

Royal Air Maroc through Casablanca and Turkish through Istanbul are doing something specific: selling one-stop itineraries into Europe from a hub that Europeans do not connect through, on aircraft that would otherwise fly with empty seats. It is the same mechanism as Icelandair through Keflavik, executed further from the destination.

The cost is time. Istanbul is a long way past most of Europe, and our Detroit and Minneapolis comparison found Turkish routing Scandinavian traffic 1,500 miles beyond the destination to make the price. That is a real trade, and it is a trade — not a trick.

The hub is the airline

Look at the last column of either table. Almost every hub has exactly one carrier behind it. Heathrow is British Airways, Istanbul is Turkish, Keflavik is Icelandair, Lisbon is TAP, Copenhagen is SAS, Casablanca is Royal Air Maroc.

Which means the choice of connecting airport is not really a choice of airport at all. It is the choice of airline, expressed geographically — and it inherits everything that comes with that airline: the cabin, the bag policy, the delay recovery, and whether the connection is protected if the first leg runs late.

Frankfurt is the exception worth naming: three carriers win routes through it, Lufthansa alongside Discover and Condor. If your itinerary connects there, check which one you are actually flying, because the seat is not the same.

Keflavik is the one worth understanding properly

It wins more routes than any other hub in either cabin, and it does so from a country of under 400,000 people. That is not an accident of geography, it is a business model.

Iceland sits roughly halfway along the great-circle route from much of the US East Coast and Midwest to much of Europe, and Icelandair sells the stop rather than hiding it. Every passenger it carries from Boston to Helsinki is filling two flights it would operate anyway. The result is the $0 median premium that makes it the cheapest carrier in our entire ranking, across 150 routes.

I have connected through Keflavik many times, first on WOW Air, which no longer exists, and since on Icelandair, and I have been to Iceland more than ten times. One thing worth knowing that no fare table shows: the airport is small and the connection is genuinely quick, which is unusual among cheap connecting hubs and matters more than it sounds when the inbound is late. Icelandair also runs a published stopover program that lets you break the journey in Iceland without paying more for the flight — check the current terms on their site rather than here, because that is their policy to change and not a figure we measure.

The honest counterweight, again: 0 out of 10 on seat. Saga Premium is a wide recliner on every aircraft at every price, so the business figures above buy you a better night than economy and not a bed.

Connecting in the US first is a different decision

About 120 of the winning economy fares connected at a US gateway before crossing — JFK, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dulles. Our tables above exclude those, because it is a different trade.

A US connection means a short domestic leg and then the ocean. A European connection means the ocean and then a short leg. When the transatlantic segment is overnight, the second shape is usually better: you sleep on the long flight and arrive with one short hop left, rather than starting the long flight already tired. When the domestic leg is the one that goes wrong, you also have not yet left the country, which is easier to recover from.

Neither is universally right. But if two itineraries are within $50 of each other and one connects at home and one connects abroad, the shape of the day is the tiebreaker, not the fare.

What this measures, and what it does not

This is a claim about the price of tickets that route through these airports. It is not a claim about terminals, transit times, lounges or minimum connection times, none of which we have measured. Heathrow being the most expensive hub in our data says nothing about whether Heathrow is a pleasant place to change planes.

Fares whose connecting airport we could not read are excluded rather than guessed. Twelve rows in the grid carry connectionUnrecorded, eleven of them British Airways — which certainly routes via London, and "certainly" is exactly what this dataset will not encode. Including them would have made Heathrow's win count look better and changed nothing about its price.

The hub table regenerates from the grid on every refresh, so a hub that stops winning routes stops appearing here.

Where to go next

If your destination has more than one airport, the question underneath this one is which European airport to fly into. If your destination is expensive and a cheaper city sits a train ride away, when to fly into a different city prices sixteen of those swaps. And the airline rankings score the carriers behind every hub in the tables above.