love

Seatmate soulmates?

While websites such as Flights from Hell are filled with stories of devilish and disgusting seatmates, there are plenty of people who have dated and gone on to marry someone they met on a plane.

Charles Lindbergh-themed Valentine

 

But what if you’ve spent a cross-country flight successfully flirting with a seatmate whose contact information you neglect to secure as you exit the plane?

A new website hopes to give shy and forgetful fliers another chance.

WeMetOnAPlane.com was created by Will Scully-Power, the co-founder of a marketing analytics company in Sydney, Australia, who met his current girlfriend while flying from Thailand to Malaysia. The lovebirds exchanged email addresses before leaving the airport, but Scully-Power suspected many other travelers skip that step and go home with a “what if?” feeling.

He was right.

“After analyzing Google’s search data, we found over 4,000 people were searching daily for someone they’d met on a plane. Yet there was no website or service availability to help facilitate a reconnection,” said Scully-Power.

In the name of love, Scully-Power launched his website in early January and began gathering stories.

Travelers seeking to reconnect with a seatmate can either post their story and hope that the cute seatmate spots it, or search the site for a seatmate’s story using a flight number, year, month, date, origin or destination. If a reply is posted, the site sends out an alert. There’s also an option to spread the word using Facebook and Twitter.

So far, only about a dozen stories have been posted and no romantic reconnects have been made. But Scully-Power notes that the site is young and still in the beginning phase.

He said the next iteration will have more social media features and ways for people to connect with one another, as well as iPhone, iPad and Android apps.

And, while love is grand, Scully-Power is also eying ways to marry the pleasure of his site with business.

In addition to mining his database for information that can be used for targeted and behavioral-based marketing, Scully-Power said he’s also seeking an exclusive global airline partner for his site. “Think mystery flights. And flights designed specifically for meeting new people.”

(This first appeared on msnbc.com Travel)