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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
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| Feb 16 2007, 4:09 PM EST (current) | Patty | 1 photo added, 1 photo deleted |
| Feb 15 2007, 4:48 PM EST | jimglab | 1 word added, 2 words deleted |
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inside track
March 2007
Matthew Daimler’s Web site helps passengers find the perfect seat.
Seatguru.com, a guide to aircraft seating, has become a trusted resource for travelers, with 35,000 visitors daily. The site has also garnered plenty of accolades, being named among Travel + Leisure’s “Top 28 Web Sites” (April 2006) and Kiplinger.com’s “25 Best Travel Sites” (October 2006). Matthew Daimler launched the site as a hobby in 2001, showing just one aircraft seat map, a United 757. Today, 40 airlines’ aircraft are displayed. Executive Travel recently sat down with Daimler.
When you started Seatguru, how highly developed was your vision?
I have a computer engineering degree and a minor in business and entrepreneurship. So, I’ve always had a combination of tech, business and entrepreneurship in my past and things I wanted to do in life. I was working at a startup in 2001, and I found myself traveling between San Francisco and Prague two or three times over a two-month period. That’s a long flight! [On one flight], a guy brought a bag down from the overhead bin—he didn’t have a seat in front of him—and he was able to take his bag and make it into a leg rest. I thought, “That’s the seat I want.” That was really the dawning on me that not all seats are created equal in economy. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if a site had a visual representation of a plane, and you could get feedback on where the good seats were?” I made a little example. If you go to seatguru.com/classic, you can see it. It was just one plane, where you could click the mouse over it. That was the first iteration of Seatguru.
Did you see this becoming a business then?
I did not. I knew there were people who would be interested in this, but I thought the market was a subset of road warriors. I couldn’t see mass market appeal. I posted it on Flyertalk.com. The feedback I got was, “Interesting idea, but where are the rest of the planes?” [A few months later,] the startup had run out of money, and I found myself unemployed and looking for projects to work on while looking for a job. I started working on it a bit, and people actually started writing in, saying, “I saw when you posted to Flyertalk, but I was waiting for you to fully develop this.” My goal was to cover the rest of United and work my way through the rest of the big six U.S. carriers, which I had done by
the summer of 2002.
At this point, there were 100 to 200 people coming a day, really a small amount of traffic. I didn’t have any ads on the site in 2001 or 2002. Then in October 2002, a writer from the Wall Street Journal came across the Web site [and wrote a story], and that little article launched it to the masses. By that time, I was back employed, working on Seatguru on the
weekends. In 2003, text ads were just becoming popular, and I tried to do that and earned a couple hundred dollars over three or four months—enough to pay the hosting bill and maybe go out to dinner. By the summer of 2003, that’s when Google launched the Adsense program. That was a watershed event for small publishers, to really be able to monetize quality content and traffic. I only put the Adsense widget on the home page, and the first day it made $100! The next day I had put the little ad widget on all the other pages. And I thought, “Maybe this is not just a hobby after all.” The same month, we incorporated in the State of Washington. We quickly started reinvesting profits into the company, creating new, custom seat maps, graphics and design. Within four or five months, someone had to quit their job, and my wife kindly volunteered in April 2004. She doubled the business for two years, and then I joined about a year ago.
How do you gather seat information and ensure its accuracy?
From the beginning, I realized I couldn’t be on every plane—that I’d have to rely on others’ feedback. Early on, I built a little form on each plane on our Web site where you can click to make comments. That goes into a database, and we’re able to look at new submissions alongside old submissions. We try to be as neutral as we can be. Everyone has different opinions on what makes a good seat or bad seat, and we’re trying to extract the information so you can make a choice about a seat that will make you happy.
What kind of relationship do you have with the airlines and the crews?
We do get email from captains and flight crews. It’s fun to be on a plane and hear them talking about [Seatguru] and recommending it to passengers. People write in all the time
to say they called reservations and were doing seat selection, and the agent for the airlines said, “Go to Seatguru.” Airlines will often send us a note to update something new they’re introducing. We do have a very good relationship in that sense—they see us as helpful.
What’s ahead for Seatguru?
We’re still focusing on the content. We continue to add airlines. Today, we have 40 different airlines represented— we need to grow that. Also, over the last few months, we’ve started writing a few travel articles. One of my personal passions is laptop power on the plane. It wasn’t covered well, so I wrote a little bit of a guide on that. In November of last year, we did a roundup of the noise-canceling headphones.
What trends do you see in aircraft seating?
We see a real discrepancy in business or first class, when you look at U.S.-based carriers versus international carriers. I think just about every domestic airline has announced a plan for new business-class or first-class seats by 2008. They’ve realized they’re behind and are catching up. The international carriers, especially the Pacific carriers, have great services and great seats, and I’m sure they are just going to continue to improve them. The other interesting thing we see going on is premium economy seating being a lot more prevalent and priced better.
What have been the most valuable lessons in growing the site?
Sometimes you don’t exactly know if something will be a success—the first level of feedback may be negative, but that might not be the full story. Give things a little more time to flesh out, or explore the idea more, or try and interact with people. Another big one has always been focusing on the content. We really try to focus the majority of our energy on the content of the Web site and what we’re ultimately delivering to the visitors.
Seatguru fun facts
- Daily visits to the site: 35,000
- Number of airlines featured: 40
- Number of aircraft featured: 280
- Number of seats reviewed: Over 20,000
- Most popular airline: United Airlines
- Surprising seat choice: Some site visitors say they prefer to find a seat next to the bathroom for first dibs when the movie ends.
