Airline Lets You Choose Seats Next to ‘Friends’

Airline Lets You Choose Seats Next to 'Friends'

Air travel is full of anxieties. The rushing. The waiting. The discomfort. The safety concerns. The security theatre.

So I was initially delighted when I saw this New York Times article about a Dutch airline allowing people to choose the people they sit next to on a flight, using social media.

KLM has recently introduced Meet and Seat — a system that allows you to choose a good seatmate by looking at information from other passengers’ LinkedIn or Facebook profiles.

At first, this struck me as fantastic. I generally dislike sitting next to strangers on airplanes. After I take my seat on an airplane, I try to mentally will passengers walking down the aisle to have seat assignments far away from me. This doesn’t always work.

As an alternative, then, I figured I could use a feature such as KLM’s to scour the profiles and photos of my fellow passengers for clues as to their person, so that I might avoid sitting next to “problem seatmates.” Armrest hoggers. Sick people. People with offensive hygiene. Noisy children. Noisy adults.

But then I realized that if I could use such a feature, the people I’d rather avoid could use such a feature too.

In the words of one KLM executive, the point of Meet and Seat is to allow for people to sit next to more “interesting” seatmates. “More interesting,” of course, is not necessarily synonymous with (and, indeed, is often contrary to) “less annoying.” As journalist Jeff Jarvis succinctly put it, “Pity the poor venture capitalist who gets seated with the start-up guy who talks his ear off for four hours.” Ditto, one might imagine, for the attractive people who find themselves surrounded by Facebook stalkers shamelessly flirting with them.

Because KLM allows unilateral seat choice with Meet and Seat, all you can do to protect yourself (short of deleting your profile) from an undesirable seat suitor choosing to sit next to you is to change your seat assignment after the fact and hope that s/he — or someone worse — does not follow you to your new seat.

Meet and Seat’s unilateralism differs from similar social programs. Planely, a startup self-billed as the “social flying revolution,” connects you with other Planely users on your flight and encourages you to reach out to them. With Planely, the choice of sitting together is mutual.

Another, Satisfly, uses an automatic system it calls “Intelligent Seating,” autocratically optimizing the flight experience of Satisfly users by assigning them seats based upon their profile compatibility. Both Planely and Satisfly work with multiple airlines.

Still, even if you successfully use one of these social tools to avoid being seated next to a nightmare, a nightmare might nonetheless form near you thanks to the same tool. Want to try to rest on the six-hour redeye from LAX to Logan before that big meeting in the morning? Good luck falling asleep to the dulcet conversational shouts of the two half-deaf rock musicians sitting behind you who found each other online!

The idea of optimizing seatmate selection is alluring, but frankly, it needs work to protect those who prefer quiet travels. Hence, I hereby propose a new social startup for airplane seating: Mulletfly.

Mulletfly would put all of the people who want to enjoy a quiet flight in the first several rows of the plane, all of the people who occasionally enjoy restrained airplane conversation in the middle rows, and all of the chatty and loud people in the rear of the aircraft.

Mulletfly’s motto: “Business in the front, party in the back.”

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