Getting the Best Seat on an Airplane
By Mark Frauenfelder February 22, 2008
*Get the pros and cons of different airline seats before learning the hard way about the pitfalls of row 44*
Being able to book your own flight makes travel planning easy. You can compare prices for different dates, check departure and arrival times at different airports, and print out your boarding pass so you don't have to wait in line at the check-in counter.
You can also use the Web to choose your seat for most airlines, but how do you know if the seat you're getting is the best one available for the class of ticket you're buying? Sure, it's easy to spot an exit row, which gives you more legroom, but there are other seats on planes that have hidden benefits you might not know about. To find out about these, visit SeatGuru (seatguru.com), which has detailed maps of seats with color-coded seat-map keys.
Green seats are good, yellow seats have potential problems, and red seats are lousy. By rolling your mouse over the seats on a seat map for a particular airline's plane, you can learn extra information. For instance, economy rows 32-34 on the United Airlines Boeing 747-400 are located in a quiet and comfy mini-cabin. Row 44 is the worst on the plane-it's near the galley, so it's noisy, the seats don't recline far, and there's no window to look through.
Besides describing chair comfort, SeatGuru also shows you where power ports are located, so you can keep your laptop or DVD player charged.
If you're already at the airport and you need to make a change to your flight, use SeatGuru's mobile site, which is specially adapted for mobile phone Web browsers (http://mobile.seatguru.com)
SeatGuru also has a Travel Resources section, with articles that tell you how to ensure you get a choice airline seat, the pros and cons of bulkhead seats, how to figure out what kind of plane you'll be on for a particular flight, and what the TSA's ever-changing baggage restrictions are.
