How I Try to Get More Comfortable When I Fly in Coach... My "Faux-Business-Class" Kit

Okay, so if you've followed my blog, you'll see that most of the great airfare deals are for coach travel. There are the occasional business-class specials I found but those are few and far between. So most of the time when I find bargains for travel, I'm going to be going coach.

So over time, I've developed a little battle pack to help me make it through in comfort -- I call it my faux-business-class kit. I've used these accessories to help me fly more comfortably on several flights, and they make a difference to me.

The way I see it, being able to fly a bit more comfortably in coach instead of worrying about business class is another little way of saving money on travel.

There are four little items which I bring onboard with me: first is the First Class Sleeper. It's an inflatable pad which you put on the seat and up the back of your seat. You sit on it and then inflate it with about ten breaths. Since it is inflating with your weight on it, it creates a cushion of air that fills in the gaps between your body and the seat, and creates a bit of an angle so you are slightly reclined even in an upright seat. I find that the cushion helps keep my back and hips less stressed for the duration of the flight.

The First Class Sleeper comes in a carry-on pouch, with a small plastic tube for inflation. At the end of the flight, it's fairly easy to deflate it, fold and roll it back down and put in back in its case. You can find it at Amazon for about $29.00 at this link: First Class Sleeper. I felt I had gotten more than my money's worth with the first trip I used it to Las Vegas.

The second accessory is an inflatable neck pillow. I know there are neck pillows that are filled with items such as buckwheat hull or such, but I choose the inflatable one just for space considerations to carry it on the flight. I think the inflatable ones also have an advantage that you can fill them to different levels depending on the firmness of support you're trying to achieve. If you're going to be reading you might want the support to be harder to keep your head up, while you might want looser support if you're trying to sleep with your head back or to the side. I just bought one of these at an airport shop before a flight, but I'm sure you can find them doing an on-line search too.

Third on the list is a nice eye mask. I've gotten thin eye masks with thin elastics which I've tried over the years, and the problem has been comfort for the long haul -- the elastic always became uncomfortable after a while. This year I looked around for some better level eye masks and came across the Lewis N Clark Comfort Eye Mask. It has a bit more padding around the eyes so it molds a bit closer to the contours around your eyes. The elastic is a thicker band which doesn't seem as strained as the thinner elastics on the more basic masks I used in the past. If you go to the 1st Stop Travel Store, you can get a Comfort Eye Mask for $8.99 with free shipping. Shutting out the lights from overhead reading lights, windows and so on is much easier now that I'm using this patch.

The fourth item I added to the list is noise-cancelling headphones. These are headphones that introduce some white noise into the sound, which blocks out much of the sounds from the exterior. The first time I tried them I was skeptical, wondering how some white noise could make that much of a difference. But on Black Friday 2006 I saw a no-name pair on sale cheap enough that I figured I'd give them a try. And even with this cheap pair, the difference was remarkable. The heavy drone of the plane engine was reduced to a milder, softer hum. The sounds from other passengers were minimized too. When I plugged these into the armrest and listened to the music, the effects of the plane sound and other passengers almost disappeared (almost, these were miracle workers). Sometimes I'd even turn off the white noise just to see what the sound was without the suppression and the jet noise was overwhelming. They really did make a difference.

Since the ones I bought were cheapos, though, I couldn't depend on them for long. They were imported from China and had a warning not to touch the wires with your bare skin, because the coating contained oil. After a couple of uses, one side of the headphones didn't get any sound. But I knew the technology worked so I knew that it was a matter of getting a better pair.

The top-of-the-line headphones for this are probably the ones made by Bose. They're known for great speaker quality and their equipment seems to have a big following regardless of the high price. Their Quiet Comfort Headphones are $299 for over-the-ear and $349 for on-the-ear. Since I fly occasionally, that price range seemed a bit high-end, but something like that might make sense for a businessperson who's flying frequently and would really get the value.

I did some searching and chose to buy Logitech Noise Canceling Headphones (currently on sale for $39.99 at Tiger Direct - regularly $69.99). These had good customer reviews, and I liked the fact that the cord was detachable so you could just use these as separate noise-cancelling devices not plugged into anything without having a dangling cord. It includes an airline adapter so the single plug can be attached to the dual-plug connections in the airline seats. It also has a flat-folding design and a sturdy carrying case to protect them. I just used them on a trip and was happy with them; not to the point that I would recommend them above all others -- but they were quite good. The pressure of the headphones seemed mildly tiring/uncomfortable after a couple of hours wearing them.

Other than this little faux-business-class travel kit, I've become accustomed to asking about emergency exit row seats. If they are available, I try and find out if there are two rows of consecutive emergency exits (as there were on USA3000 flights I took this week). In that case I ask for the seats in the second row of emergency exits since those seats would still recline. If I'm told that I can't get emergency exits or bulkhead seats, I try and find out which row is just in front of the emergency row and avoid those like the plague -- those don't recline at all, you lose even that bit of comfort.

Well, that's it for now -- I hope these tips give you some ideas on how it's possible to be flying a bit more comfortably even when you're getting travel bargains in coach! Bon voyage!