Judgment Seat

• Share

For those of you who are sick of getting stuck with a seat by the aircraft toilet (again), there is deliverance in the form of SeatGuru.com—a know-all site that enables you to check the cabin configuration before you fly, so you can decide in advance which row and seat number to request.

The idea came from Seattle businessman and frequent flier Matthew Daimler. "In 2001, my job required extensive travel between San Francisco and Europe," he says. "I quickly noticed that there were a handful of prime seats and terrible seats in each cabin ... I started to post my observations on the Internet and there was immediate interest." Eight million visitors later and the site is providing seating information for 29 major carriers. SeatGuru.com uses color coding and icons to denote facilities such as laptop power connections and different types of entertainment systems, as well as to rate overall comfort level (based on factors like legroom, reclinability and noise).

We decided to test fly the site for ourselves and found that couples traveling aboard a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747-400 Version 3 can't beat the adjacent seats A and C in rows 61 to 63. These are rare rows of two seats each, with extra storage space between the seats and the window. The guru does warn that the extra gap may get in the way of snoozing against the window pane—but it sure beats being stuck by that queue for the toilet.