Voyeuristic Travel Sites

I’ve written about Seatguru.com and a few other helpful sites in the past, but there are a slew of other websites out there that provide an insider’s view of travel. These two are my favorites.

*Flightstats.com is what many pilots rely on to stay informed about delays and cancelled flights, since the site offers up details about altered flights often before they make it to the airlines’ individual sites.You can also see the likelihood of your flight being cancelled, and the difference in time between the time a flight is scheduled to leave the gate and then the runway. For example, for one flight leaving Dulles International in Washington, DC, the gate departure time is listed as 5:26, but runway time is 5:44. You’ll also discover the different codeshares and that the same flight can have different flight numbers.

*Then take a look at Planereality.com. No, I mean, go there NOW, or at least after you finish reading this post. Chris Mangiapane runs a fascinating site that provides a vicarious, almost too intimate look at the international first- and business-class flights he takes on a regular basis along with airport lounges, hotels, and other places he frequents. It’s almost like a reality show. You’ll get the lowdown — the good and the painfully bad — in each post along with plenty of photos that will make you almost feel like you’re there. He recommends specific seats, reproduces menus, reviews onboard amenity kits — see the above example from Delta — and is brutally honest and often funny. Here’s a sample from his entry on an airport hotel in Seoul: “The colors were putrid and the wallpaper torn. If I were to imagine a whorehouse, this is what it looks like. On the counter there was an ‘Ultra Violet Ray Sterilizer’ where dirty glasses could be found; dirty like… lipstick stains on the glass. I guess this sterilizer was not for sterilizing (the on/off button was broken off) but just made for good storage.”