KLM’s ‘Meet & Seat’ social seating lets passengers pick an
interesting seat mate

Larger image

7 February 2012 | KLM today has launched a ‘Meet & Seat’ scheme which
encourages passengers to pick seatmates by checking out social media profiles of
fellow passengers who link to their profiles during check-in. The idea is that
flyers will be able to find out about interesting people who will be on board
their KLM flight, for example other passengers attending the same event at the
destination. The ‘social seating’ feature has been launched on flights between
Amsterdam and San Francisco, Sao Paolo and New York City with plans to extend it
to other intercontinental destinations shortly.

Although the idea of the ‘social flight’ in itself is not entirely new – it
was coined by digital media guru Jeff Jarvis a few years ago, while airlines
such as Malaysia Airlines and Estonian Air have experimented with the
concept – KLM’s new ‘Meet & Seat’ tool takes the idea of ‘social seating’ a
step further, as until now social media users could only connect with their
friends before a flight, while KLM allows anyone to connect with anyone.

KLM says it is trying to give travellers a more “inspirational journey” with
the service enabling them to see who is on the flight, perhaps meet for a coffee
beforehand, select seats next to each other or share a taxi at the other end.
The tool will be opt-in only, to allow the many travellers who view flight time
as private time.

How it works
Passengers who have booked a KLM flight from
Amsterdam to New York, San Francisco or Sao Paulo (or back), can go to KLM.com
and log in to the ‘Manage my Booking’ section. They then go to the ‘Seating’
tab, click ‘Meet & Seat’ and connect their social profiles with their
booking by logging in to their Facebook or LinkedIn account.

After selecting the profile details they want to share
with other passengers and adding their travel details and languages spoken, the
seat map shows other passengers who have also shared their profile details, and
which seat they have chosen. Passengers then can select their seat, for example
next to someone with similar interests. Passengers can not ‘block’ a specific
person for sitting next to them, other than opting out of the Meet & Seat
tool and anonymously select another seat.

When other passengers on the flight share their details via Meet & Seat
at a later stage, passengers who registered earlier then receive an e-mail, so
they can change seats if they want to. KLM emphasizes that passengers can always
choose to show less or more profile details, or remove their profile details
from the seat map entirely. Meet & Seat will be available in 90 days and can
be used 48 hours before departure. For more on KLM ‘Meet & Seat’ see this video, or read airlinetrends.com’s comment on the
service in this MSNBC article.

KLM and social media
KLM, which has over 1 million Facebook fans and 220,000 followers on Twitter, has
developed a reputation when it comes to digital media campaigns that combine the
online, virtual environment with the offline, real world. Earlier social media
initiatives include a Delft Blue-tiles livery based on profile pictures of the
airline’s Facebook fans, passengers at Schiphol Airport who were randomly surprised with a personal gift based on their tweets
or Facebook messages, and a commercial flight from Amsterdam to Miami with
tickets exclusively sold via Twitter. The airline also runs several
online communities, called Clubs, based on themes such as golf,
running, China and Africa.