My Essential Travel Apps
- Sam
- May 2
- 5 min read
Tech forms the backbone of our lives, and has come to make travel easier. With more information than ever, it may seem hard to work out what to trust. Well here are five of my essential travel apps/websites that go with me, wherever I am.
SeatSpy
Right, let's just ignore the fact that the front page of SeatSpy is my doppelgänger. I promise this isn’t another project of mine!
SeatSpy is an ingenious tool to find available reward seats across multiple airlines, most useful for me being British Airways and Virgin Atlantic. But SeatSpy also tracks available seats for Air France, American, Brussels, Cathay Pacific, Croatia, Etihad, KLM, LOT Polish Airlines, Lufthansa, and Swiss.
What makes SeatSpy stand out to me compared to other alternatives, is the ability for you to set up an alert for a particular route/day/class, and SeatSpy will inform you via WhatsApp. With so much of my life communicated on WhatsApp, having a platform like SeatSpy integrate onto there just means I have one fewer thing to check.
The other feature is “Where can I go?”.
Essentially, you put in a date range, and what airline you wish to travel, and SeatSpy will generate a world map with all the available seats. For my search I have used March 3rd to March 6th for my outbound, and March 13th to March 16th for my inbound, on British Airways.
From that search the map is generated, with the ability to further filter based on points per traveller, amount of passengers, and class of service. If you’re not tied to a particular destination, this tool is an excellent time saver. I have used this tool to find last minute holidays to great effect. SeatSpy isn’t free, but at only £2.99 a month, I find this an easy cost to justify in time savings. Sign up here for a 14 day free trial!
Expertflyer
Expertflyer is a more technical tool in comparison to Seatspy. Whereas I use Seatspy in the pre-booking stage, I use Expertflyer post-booking. Whilst Expertflyer has many elements to it, the parts I use most are “Seat Map”, and “Aircraft Change Alert”. On our recent trip to New Zealand, I wanted to avoid being Qatared (the act of changing aircraft to one with a worse seat). To know about this, I set up an alert for Aircraft Change. For our last flight back to London, I received an email saying that our aircraft had indeed changed from an A350-1000 to an A350-900. In this instance, it was inconsequential, as both aircraft were equipped with Qsuite.
Seat Map does what it says on the tin. Just put in the flight details, and it will generate the seat map for that flight. For this example I’ve used BA15 Heathrow to Singapore, May 1st, in Business.
Using the key at the top, you can then decipher the map. From this, I can see that seats 12D, 12F, and 13D are free, and 13J is blocked from booking. So if I were booked on that flight, this is an easier to access, and more informative tool than an airlines website. I also use this pre-booking to see if a particular seat is available on a given flight. There is a free tier to Expertflyer, but you are limited to how many searches you can make.
Aerolopa
Ever wanted to know ahead of time whether your window seat actually has a window? Sounds silly, but all you need to do is check out Ryanair’s Twitter and you’ll see this happens all the time. Aerolopa has the most detailed, and most extensive aircraft maps on the internet, showing not only windows, but also galleys, toilets, and bassinets, all things you might want to avoid. The previous industry leader Seatguru is now wholly out of date and unreliable.
Let’s take the example of Norse Atlantic’s Boeing 787-9.
By looking at the diagram, you can see that row 40 starts to taper in, resulting in less space, and row 38 features no window. Whilst this may not bother some people, I wouldn’t want to miss out on those views!
The list of airlines is extensive, as you can tell from the list on the left not getting past the letter A!
Towards the base of the diagrams is additional information about the aircraft. In this case, I can see information about the seat width, pitch, and recline of seats in both Premium Economy, and Economy cabins.
Additionally you can find really helpful information on the legroom on some aircraft. This British Airways A321neo has reduced legroom as you go towards the rear.
Aerolopa is a completely free service, so I always make sure to consult Aerolopa to help me pick the best seat.
Staff Traveller
This one won’t be for everyone. Staff Traveller is only meant to be available for those in the aviation industry, and proof of employment is needed in registration.
I'll let Staff Traveller themselves explain how it works.
"Let's say you want to staff travel from New York to Amsterdam
You post requests for the flights from JFK to AMS on the airlines you can staff travel on, on the dates you want to know the seat availability for
People at the airlines of the flights that you have selected get a notification
They answer your requests with the actual loads
You receive a notification with the updated loads"
In the below example, a request was posted asking for the loads on a British Airways flight that they were taking to Dubai.
As you can see, at the time of this request there were Two Business seats, One Premium Economy, and 33 Economy seats available, with 12 members of staff listed on the waitlist. And here hits the crux of what Staff Traveller was designed for, to help staff travelling on non-revenue tickets get on available flights. Why bother try list yourself for a midday departure if you know it’s going to be full, when the 8pm red eye is only half full, therefore essentially guaranteeing you will board that flight. But I like using just to have a look at how busy my flight is going to be, aka, will I have a spare seat next to me.
If you are like me, and you happen to have any friends or family within the industry, go ahead and ask them if they have heard of this service, as it is an incredibly insightful insider tool.
Airalo
Rant time, pre-Brexit I specifically chose a contract with Three just for the worldwide roaming they had included in their contracts. But unsurprisingly this went away, among other things.
In its place I have relied on e-sims when abroad. For those that don’t know, instead of having to insert a regular plastic sim, an e-sim is simply downloaded onto the phone for use. In this case, I use the Airalo app to handle this for me. I simply select the country, which sim fits my needs, and after payment hit download, and that sim is up and running on my phone. You will need internet on your device at the time of purchase, so I tend to do it pre-departure, or at my arrival airport on their WiFi. There are other providers, but I find Airalo reliable, and fairly priced. Use the code "SAM0483" to save £2.50 on your next e-sim.
Hopefully this is helpful to you, if you have any of your own suggestions, please feel free to write them below.
Sam
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