Category: Guest Experience (GX)

Event planners have to fly a lot for their jobs: off-site meetings, destination weddings, continuing education, site selection… the list goes on and on.

Delta and LinkedIn recently partnered to make flying a bit more social, according to this post on FastCoCreate:

The serendipitous meeting on a flight is the stuff of urban legend.
We’ve all met someone who has a story about a marriage, business deal,
career move, or even just an inspiring conversation that began with a
random seat assignment.

Just in time for TED 2014, Delta Airlines has teamed with LinkedIn to make the whole lucky flight
partner legend a bit more official with a new initiative called Innovation Class.

Created by agency Wieden+Kennedy New York, the campaign is offering
customers who are LinkedIn members the opportunity to meet and fly with
select industry leaders on a designated Delta flight. The first winner
was CEO of Patten Studio James Patten who won a seat next to Pebble
Technology CEO Eric Migicovsky on a flight from Salt Lake City to
Vancouver for TED, and now stars in a brand video of their airborne
encounter.

This got me to thinking about Ticketmaster’s built-in social seating function; is social seating coming to your flights in the near future? What do you think of airline social seating — would it be creepy or cool to connect your LinkedIn account when you purchase a plane ticket, and select your seat based on the possibility of striking up a “serendipitous” conversation? What do you think about social seating in general, especially seating software apps like SocialTables that let planners use social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn to seat guests?