Welcome back to Tuesday Tools and Tips. This will be a series to help the traveler and runner with various tools and tips that will help to make your training and traveling easier. If you have suggestions or questions that would apply to this weekly series, feel free to contact me and let me know and I will work it in!
Tuesday Tools and Tips: SeatGuru
When traveling by plane, it can make a huge difference to have a good seat. If you have elite status, you can hope for that upgrade to come through to get the best seats. However, if you do not have elite status or do not get the upgrade, then you need to plan ahead to pick the best seats for the flight.
Everyone has a different time that qualifies as a “long” flight. For me, I can pretty much sit in any seat for 2 hours. For flights that last longer than that, I want to select a seat that I know will be the most comfortable. How does someone find that information out without personally experiencing each plane? Enter SeatGuru. SeatGuru has made some great advances recently and has really updated their flight database to be more up to date with the current fleets of airplanes.
SeatGuru lists the the specs on the planes flown by different airlines and shows which seats are good, warning seats, and poor seats. The plane information also lists the amenities on the flight (power ports, wifi, etc). Let’s look at an example of what it does.
Fill in your airline and flight number (date can be helpful for foreign flights where they may alternate aircraft)
The time of departure/arrival is shown for that flight as well as the aircraft type
The seating details for the seats on that plane
The image of the plane showing the best, decent, and worst seats.
When you mouseover a seat, it gives the reason for the rating.
When you use your mouse to hover over one of the seats, it will show you the review for that particular seat.Obviously, red seats are to be avoided at all costs! Most of the time, they are going to be limited in legroom due to the curvature of the aircraft or limited in recline.
SeatGuru is a great tool to use to select the seats that would give you the most comfort for your journey. It is not perfect, but that is mostly due to the fact that airlines have multiple versions of the same model aircraft. These different versions may have different seat maps so you have to check. To do your best to determine which model you are on, compare the seat map from the airline under your reservation to the seat map on SeatGuru to find that model. Once you have it, go ahead and select the seats you want!
Sometimes, the best seats ranked by SeatGuru are blocked for elite members only or as extra pay seats. In this case, you can at least use SeatGuru to know which seats to avoid. SeatGuru has been my best friend many times and should be one of your tools for your next journey. For the runner, legroom is one of the most important things during flight. SeatGuru can help you with that.
