Flying can be such a burden at times and in my case, it is finding the right flight, the best seats and then a good price. I don’t do a ton of traveling, but when I do, I tend to put in way too much time trying to find the best solution. I am always looking for apps that can help simplify and make this process much smoother and less time consuming.
I never thought I would want to use an iPhone app to search and book flights, but when I got my hands on SeatGuru, I have to say I was intrigued to say the least. The app lets you search and book flights, find information on seats as well as check a flight’s status. This is kind of your one-stop shop app for flight travel.
Searching For Flights
SeatGuru does a good job of giving you a quick and easy way to find the flight that you need. When searching, you need to put in the standard information of when, where and how many people. Once you do that, it finds you flights for a variety of airlines that match your search. If you don’t necessarily have a specific date that you have to fly, you can also select flexible dates, where you are given a one-month calendar with the different prices for each day.
Searching For Flights
Once you select an airline or price that you are interested in, you are then given a selection of flights to choose from. Then when you select the one that you want, you can book it. They have partnered with Orbitz, Cheap Air, Expedia, CheapTickets and Airfare.com to find flights for their customers. You can either decide to stick with the site that you found, or select one of the other partners. The nice part about this feature is that even though you are taken to the mobile site to book your flight, you are still inside of the SeatGuru app.
Purchasing Tickets
Seat Map Advice
Let’s say that you are ready to book your flights and you’re searching for seats that will work for you. But you are on a plane that you have never taken before and you want to see what the seats are like. SeatGuru has a feature named Seat Map Advice where you can search by either flight No., route or airline. Once you find the flight you are looking to book, you can click on it and select the type of plane. Then you are given a seat map and you can click on any one to reveal more details about it. The only downside to this feature is that you have to know what kind of plane it is you are going to be on. I wish that the app would know based upon the flight No. what type you would be flying and show you that seat map.
Seat Map Advice
Flight Status
The last feature is the ability to check the status of a flight. All you have to do is either put in the information for the flight No. or if you don’t know it, enter the route. Once you find the one you are looking for, you can see the status and whether it is on time or not. You can also get alerts for the flight and email the itinerary to people.
Checking on the flight status
Thoughts
After playing around with the app for a little while, I really like that it incorporates the three features listed above into one. There are other ones out there that just have one or two of these features, but not all three.
Although the seat map advice feature is nice, I think they could do without it, especially if you have to figure out what kind of plane you will be in for the flight. I do like the fact that you have the option to buy your tickets within the app, even though it is from another website. This makes it very handy for people that are on the go that want to book their flights from their iPhone.
What will be interesting about an app like this is that most people when they are looking for flights, usually like to look at them either on their computer or possibly an iPad. I know for me being that I don’t book flights often, I just hop on my computer and do it that way. So can an iPhone app that has all of these features entice people to actually use it and possibly even book their flights on it? To the average flyer, maybe not, but to the one who needs to be mobile and flies a lot, this app may come in very handy.
Conclusion
Overall, I liked using SeatGuru because I can use it for more than just checking flight statuses if I needed to. I am not sure if I would use it to book a flight being that I don’t travel a lot, but I do like the option. I hope at some point in the future they can fix the Seat Map Advice feature so that you don’t have to know what kind of plane you are flying in order to get advice on it. But other than that, it is a solid app and it works well.