Choosing Flights Based on Comfort
Airfare 101: Find the Lowest Fares
Price and schedule are the two most critical factors to consider when you are booking a flight. But not all airplane flights are created equal. The other factor that you should consider is comfort. How densely are the seats packed on the plane? Are there seatback entertainment systems? How likely is your flight to arrive on time?
While price and schedule figure prominently on every airfare booking site, information about the onboard flight experience takes a little more work to uncover.
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Airplane information available on booking sites
Some more detailed flight information is displayed directly on different booking sites. Of course, the airline may switch planes between the time you book and the time you take the flight, so it is always possible that things may change.
- Google Flights. Google Flights does an excellent job (as usual). Just click on any flight in the list of options and it will expand to show most of the key information about the aircraft, including the distance between seats and the availability of some of the most important amenities.
- Momondo / Kayak. Expanding a flight on Momondo or Kayak shows similar information. You'll need to hover over or click the icons to see the distance between seats.
- Skyscanner. Skyscanner doesn't show any information about your onboard experience, not even the type of plane that is being used. If you want to learn more about the flight, you’ll need to look up the flight on Google Flights or another website.
Adding seat and carry-on bag information to Google Flights result listings
A 3rd party Chrome extension called Legrooms for Google Flights adds information about seat distances and carry-on bag fees directly to the Google Flights search results, so you can scan them quickly, rather than needing to click to view each individual flight. You can install it in the Chrome browser and it will work automatically whenever you use Google Flights. Once you install it, you can right-click on the icon to hide it from the Google menu bar.
Getting more information on Seat Guru
If you want to dig into the seating details for any flight, the go-to tool is SeatGuru. You can look up information with a flight number or just the airline and aircraft type. Not only does it provide information about seat spacing and amenities, it provides a visual display that highlights particularly good and bad seats.
It is especially valuable to take the time to use Seat Guru when you are flying business class. The difference between the seat configurations in the business class section of different planes can be significant. On some flights, you get true “lie-flat” or “flat-bed” seats. On other flights, you’ll be stuck in angled seats that are much less comfortable. If you see a flight that says “angle-flat”, the operative word is "angled" not "flat". Herringbone design usually translates to more comfort compared to more traditional seats that face straight forward.
When you are flying on American, Delta, and United within the United States, most “first class” seats are roomier than coach seating, but not nearly as nice as the business class seats used on most international flights. However, some of their routes are operated with planes that are set up with their international configurations. Seat Guru can help identify those routes.
On-time percentages
If you are looking for on-time percentages, your best is FlightStats (which is temporarily halted until air travel stabilizes again).
Airline Ratings
AQR (Air Quality Rating) is a good source of information about US Airlines, mostly pulled from government information sources.
For international airlines, you can find detailed information from SkyTrax. It rates each airline, on dozens of different attributes, and gives them a 1 to 5-star rating.
