If you're one of those awful, annoying people who thinks flying is a social experience and feels the need to point out every single useless item in the SkyMall catalogue to your seatmate while he/she/ze pretends to be asleep, Dutch airline KLM has now given you a new way to be awful and annoying. Its Meet and Seat program allows passengers to choose who they want to sit with on flights by scoping out potential seatmates' LinkedIn and Facebook profiles.
Inspired by Malaysia Airlines' MLHBuddy, a social media program that allowed users to see if any of their Facebook friends would be on their flight or in their destination city, Meet and Seat provides KLM travelers with a venue to select their seatmates on transcontinental flights from Amsterdam based on their Facebook profiles. According to a NY Times blog post, passengers are presented with a seat map of others who have shared their profiles, and the person who you opt to sit with will be sent a message with your own personal details. So thanks to this program, you can now chat with your seatmate about your mutual friends, your Farmville profiles, and your shared interest in Drake, chess, and "people who aren't mean."
The option is only available to ticket-holders who register for the program online, so KLM passengers wary of creepsters who might take advantage of the program can opt out of sharing their personal information if they so choose. However, as someone who is terrified of flying, I prefer to spend every airborne experience completely zonked out of my mind in a state of non-communicative quasi-consciousness; people like me are anxious enough about flying without having to worry about forty-eight-year-old mouth-breathers leering at us and asking about our "It's Complicated" relationship statuses. Let's hope that there are enough KLM travelers who share my sentiments about this, so this won't become a thing on this side of the Atlantic.
