Since I am a giant in a little person’s world, I can end up extremely uncomfortable while traveling, especially since I normally do what everyone does and that is to simply purchase whatever flight is cheapest with little regard paid to the reputation of various airlines.

It was about 20 years ago when someone suggested to me that you need to ask for an exit row because the legroom is much much bigger than the regular seats. Today, even with my legs fully stretched out my feet barely went under the seat in front of me. No one in my aisle had to get up to let anyone in or out, and I could barely reach my laptop on the tray table.

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I am not certain about the airline policy regarding the exit row seats, but nearly every time I have asked to be put in one, there was one available. This was also true on sold out flights so I don’t know what is going on there. Most of our exit row seats had no people in them despite the fact that the flight was nearly full. I guess there are a lot of people out there that don't know about this. Maybe it is better to keep them in the dark so I can always have mine :P

Let’s just say that I have never ended up in an exit row by accident. I think this has something to do with the passengers have to be physically capable of getting the door open in the case of an emergency which brings me to my next benefit of the exit rows: Children are not allowed in them.

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I am not trying to berate anyone who has kids or anything silly like that but I think we have all experienced the horror that having a 2 or 3 year old somewhat near you on the plane. They don’t make headphones loud enough to drown that high-pitched screamer out. In the exit row, there is going to be at least some space between yourself and the crying machine – this is just an added bonus… mostly it is all about the leg room.

So if you are a super-tall human like me I strongly suggest you try this out on your next flight. You have to ask for it when checking in, and you’ll have to actually speak to a human to make this happen because I haven’t ever seen them offered on the self check-in kiosks.

I had an extremely comfortable first leg of my flight thanks to this. Let’s hope the excellence can continue as I board my international flight from Bangkok to Vientiane in about an hour.