Anyone who knows me, knows that I despise flying and the airlines that provide this service. The list of reasons is long and really for another day. However, there is one aspect of booking a flight online that I must give the airlines kudos for and that's the seat selection feature. While this feature has been around for quite some time, I realized that this ability to select my specific seats on a flight is something that is lacking in the online theater reservation space. It is a perfect example of a small change in user experience making a big difference in customer satisfaction. When you're on a 5-hour flight from California to New York, making sure you're not sitting next to the bathroom can be a big CSAT issue for you. The biggest problem with airline travel is the user's feeling of a lack of control over everything: the bag check fees, the security checkpoint, the waiting on the tarmac for 2-hours, etc. Selecting your seats give you a small piece of that control back.
Last weekend, I bought my son tickets to go see the Nick Jr. Live show with Dora, The Backyardigans, and a host of other characters at the Paramount in Seattle. Many of the ticket sites have a big problem with ticket scalpers and so you have only a few minutes to purchase your tickets. During the process you are presented with pre-selected seats based on a general area you want to sit in. This black box process gives you no control of seeing exactly what's available in the entire theater. If you don't like your seats, your only option is to restart the process and hope you get a better selection. It reminds me of picking a new telephone number when you move. My wife will sit on the phone with the telephone company until a number she likes comes up. Wouldn't it be better if you could select your number online from a list? In any event (pun intended), the theater companies usually have detailed seating charts of their theater; it's just a matter of mapping these charts up to something similar to what the airlines use. While this sounds easy enough to implement, I am sure there are financial reasons for keeping what seats are taken in a black box to consumers. This allows theaters to hold seats and probably do other practices that are hidden from the common theater goer. If theaters really wanted to get fancy they could have a virtual seating chart - when you select your seats, you could then actually see how the stage appears from the seats you selected. The possibilities are endless and adds just one more reason for a customer to want to patronize a particular venue. In the meantime, I'll just keep picking my window seats on flights when I know I won't be getting up.
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