Getting the Best Seat on the Airplane - It's a Loooong Flight, Folks

Folks, if you enjoy our blog and end up using Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) for any future trips of your own, please use our names - Sheila and Terry Calhoun - when you sign up. That will give us a little bit of credit with OAT for a future trip . . . and get you $100 off of your first trip with OAT. You will also need this number: 1027952. Thanks.

One of the coolest things I have found out about in preparation for this trip is that there are a number of websites that specialize in letting travelers (That's us!) learn ahead of time, without experiencing an around-the-world flight in a cramped seat, which are the best seats on airplanes (and which are the worst). See the image at left which is exemplary of the ones you can find for each aircraft, as flown by each airline.

The one we used is called Seat Guru. Since we are flying Northwest Airlines (NWA) on a Boeing 747-400, we learned that seats 63 & 64 A-C, despite being near the back of the plane, have no "neighbors." That's right, Sheila and I are flying for 17.5 hours to Shanghai without having to lean up against anyone other than ourselves.

You can find our on your airline reservation what kind of plane you are on, and Seat Guru will show you a diagram of every seat with "desirable" and "avoid at all costs" seats clearly and colorfully marked.

In the case of NWA, you can begin reserving seats 90 days before the flight takes off. So, yesterday I got up early, went to the airline site, and got us seats 64 A-C all the way to Shanghai. In about a month, I'll do the same thing to ensure good seats on our return flights.

Why Blog & Why OAT

Folks, if you enjoy our blog and end up using Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) for any future trips of your own, please use our names - Sheila and Terry Calhoun - when you sign up. That will give us a little bit of credit with OAT for a future trip . . . and get you $100 off of your first trip with OAT. You will also need this number: 1027952. Thanks.

We've begun this blog precisely 89 days from our departure on a trip to Shanghai, Beijing, other cities, the Yangzte River, Tibet, and Hong Kong, using the services of Overseas Adventure Travel.

We both like to write, so we're satisfying that urge, but we also have been appalled at our inability on the web to discover much useful information about taking such a trip. Maybe that's because there is so much stuff on the internet that the good stuff can't be found. Maybe there isn't any good stuff. One thing is certain, we could not find much except for the advertisements of various companies, hotels, and airlines. We really hope that what we learn and share will be findable for others looking for such information and be helpful with their travel plans.

Why OAT?

We've selected Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) for our first tour of this sort after about 8 months of my inquiring of many friends and colleagues, plus some web research.

The organization I work for, the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) is a professional organization with members who plan for the future of higher education. Many of the members travel overseas a lot on academic research, business, or on vacation. I began in February 2007 asking them, whenever I had the opportunity, if they had done tours like we wanted to do and, if so, who they had used and what were their results. OAT, or its sister company, Grand Circle Travel (GCT), were consistently mentioned and praised.

My web research backed up their recommendations. Not only was the OAT website the best we found, what few reviews of OAT and GCT we could find on various online travel forums like Epinions and Trip Advisor (had the most pertinent reviews) were almost always good. (The one negative review we found was from someone who was disturbed after their particular tour guide was allegedly fired, post-trip, due to traveler criticisms.)

We're early into our relationship with OAT, so we'll be writing about our experiences as we go along. I hope they'll be good and yesterday I got more evidence that that will be the case: The editor of my employer's magazine returned a couple of weeks ago from a barge and bike trip of France. It turns out that he had used OAT, and for the first time. He raves about OAT's organization, logistics, people, and the way that he and his wife had experiences that they would not have found on their own, or would have paid a lot more money for. (And he's a seasoned overseas traveler, an historian who knew what he was looking for on this trip.) Best of all for Sheila and I, some of his fellow travelers in France had recently taken the same China trip we are going on and had only very good things to say about it!