Category Archives: travel

One of the most best time killers on a flight is the little display that shows you exactly where in the world your flight is.  FlightAware provides this same information but puts it on the web for anyone who might need to track a flight.  Want to know where your loved ones are as they fly to and from home?  It’s really simple, you just put in the flight number and it takes you to a nifty little map that includes a time remaining counter.  Stuck in the airport and the desk tells you your plane is delayed?  Pull up the flight information and find out how close the plane is!  The picture above is another feature, you can track the flights around an airport.  I was bored so I threw together an animation of about 10 minutes that you can see if you click the above thumbnail.  As you can see… (more…)

Ever been faced with the seat selection screen when booking your plane ticket and wishing you knew a LOT more than the tiny little plane diagram could tell you?  Well, Seatguru is the place to go when you are faced with that decision.  They’ve looked at everything that makes a seat good and what makes a seat bad.  The last time I flew out to San Francisco I had great seats every time.  No seats that don’t recline, no seats with a bad view of the movie screen, and no seats with luggage and leg room taken up by those under seat air handlers!  There is a lot more to be learned from the site too, if you are trying to decide what airline to take you can check out their comparison chart to make sure their seats have a nice recline angle, find out if you get your own personal in -seat TV screen, or if you might be able to plug in your laptop or DVD player.  There really is a wealth of information available and the notes and color coding on the plane diagram make picking the perfect seat a breeze!

  Thanks to reader Mike Martin for pointing out AirfareWatchDog.com to me.  I had never heard of the site, but it’s pretty unique and you can find some really good deals.  Instead of crawling for good flight deals, the folks over at AirfareWatchDog go looking for the deals manually.  This approach lets them snag some deals from carriers that don’t lend themselves to a robotic approach.  For this reason alone I will be checking this site AND FareCast before I book any flights.  The deals are organized by city and each city has a RSS feed associated with it, a feature that makes the site vastly more usable.  You can tell this isn’t a big budget operation, they have crammed ads onto just about every place imaginable and are willing to send you free cards (That’s their picture at the top there) for word of mouth advertising.  I think that paying a consultant to help with SEO and ad layout would be a worthwhile expenditure, because this site has a lot to offer air travelers and many might be turned off by the jumbled pages of the site.