Flight Search from anywhere to a specific destination
Many flight search engines allow you to pick a departure airport and search for flights to anywhere. E.g. Google flights gives you a nice map with prices next to destinations for a set of dates and an origin you selected. We covered this question widely in "How can I do a "broad" search for flights?" here on our site.
I want to have the reverse, i.e. I know my dates and my destination (for a one-way flight) and I want to know from where it is cheapest to fly there. Is there any flight search engine out there to achieve this?
Google flights does not do this, they pre-compile the "from"-field if I try to leave it empty. I know I could use Matrix with a wide range of departure airports but that does not give me low-cost carriers and I do not trust the matrix results for such a wide range of parameters anymore.
Edit: It has been asked in comments why I would want such a feature. Well currently I'm planning my summer vacation and I would like to spend one week traveling around basically anywhere in that area before I have to go to a specific location at a specific time. One of the main price and convenience factors for me is that final flight so I would like to optimize it first. I'm sure I'm not the only one with that kind of constraints.
Best Answer
This is one of the reasons I liked the Airline Route Mapper data.
Say I want to find out all the routes with a destination of IOM:
$ awk '$3=="IOM"' routes.dat
BA LCY IOM * 0 S20
BE BHX IOM 0 DH4
BE LPL IOM 0 DH4
BE MAN IOM 0 DH4 E75
EI DUB IOM * 0 AT4
U2 LGW IOM 0 319
U2 LPL IOM 0 319
V9 BHD IOM 0 L4T
V9 BLK IOM 0 L4T
V9 GLO IOM 0 L4T
V9 NCL IOM 0 J31
Only problem is that the data is infrequently updated. However it's a good pointer to what is likely to be available. The other data sets will allow you to import data into something like SQLITE and then filter based on country, distance, proximity to somewhere else, etc.
Edit: As mentioned in comments this only allows routes to be found and potential origins would have to be fed into another flight search engine for pricing.
Alternatively, skyscanner allows origins at a country level, e.g. UK to IOM or France to MAD.
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How do I find flights from anywhere to a certain location?
What is Skyscanner Everywhere Search?How do I search Google Flights from anywhere?
Simply navigate to the Google Flights homepage at google.com/flights, enter your departure airport, but leave your destination blank. Otherwise, just head to flights.google.com/explore to pull it up straight away. You can then filter for things like trip duration, number of stops, airlines, bags and more.How do I search for flights with multiple stops?
How to use Skyscanner's multi-city flight search. On the Skyscanner homepage or app, select 'Multi-city' at the top of the search panel. Then: Enter up to six legs of your journey, selecting your departure airport, destination and dates from the drop-down menus.How do you do a private flight search?
Simply navigate to the browser menu, usually found in the upper right-hand corner of your browser window, and select \u201cNew incognito/private window.\u201dHOW TO FIND CHEAP FLIGHTS - My Best Tips After Booking 500+ Flights
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Answer 2
It's not exactly what you want, but in google flights you can enter multiple airports for both departure and arrival airport, separating the airport codes with commas. You can use it to restrict your search to a reasonable list of airports you may be interested in. The results can be filtered and sorted in the usual way. Example: find all flights from all airports in New York, plus Boston and Houston to a few locations in Europe. 
Answer 3
Most airlines fly to a destination and back again. Pretend you are flying the other way to get a feel for the airlines and their fares. This way you will narrow it down to few routings. Then do a few specific searches for your actual direction of travel.
The other way is to not be so obsessed with cost. For example, consider if it is worthwhile spending an extra €10 on the bus, plus an extra night's accommodation, and getting to the airport at 5am, just to save €30 on the airfare.
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