Flighty 3.0

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch last week:

With today’s launch of Flighty 3.0, users will have a new way of sharing their flight information with trusted others, without having to rely on forwarding airline confirmation emails or sending texts.

Instead, Flighty is introducing the concept of “Flighty Friends,” a way to track loved ones’ flight details automatically. The concept builds on the friends’ flights feature already available in previous versions of Flighty, which allowed users to share their live flight information with others through the app.

Now, users can connect directly with one another in Flighty — similar to how you would “friend” someone on a social network. Afterward, the connected users would receive updates about their family members’ or friends’ flights on an ongoing basis. The app’s notifications would then read something like “mom has landed,” instead of just noting a flight number has landed, and would include the user’s profile photo.

Terrific update to one of my very favorite iOS apps. We don’t fly a ton, but my family flies often enough that Flighty’s $89/year family plan feels like a bargain. It’s just $49/year for a single-user account. Everything about Flighty is just so nice, and so convenient. Its Live Activities widget is so well done that Apple featured Flighty in the WWDC keynote, and gave it an Apple Design Award this year.

Last year I had a flight get cancelled about an hour before it was supposed to start boarding. I got an alert from Flighty, immediately dashed over to the nearest gate agent, and got rebooked on another flight before American Airlines notified me that the original flight had been cancelled.

Back in January I wrote about the vast discrepancy between best-of-breed apps on iOS compared to Android, using Mastodon clients as an example. Flighty is another such exemplar. It’s exclusive to iOS and MacOS, and there’s simply nothing close to it on Android. Flighty’s free mode is quite useful too, and you get access to Flighty Pro free of charge for your first flight.

See also: Gunnar Olson writing for Thrifty Traveler, and
Dawn Gilbertson writing for the WSJ.

★ Wednesday, 2 August 2023