What does Flown mean on a review?

Flown means Jon has personally flown that exact airline in that exact cabin on a route to or from Europe. Not the same airline in a different cabin, and not the same cabin on a different continent. If any of those change, the review is labeled Researched instead.

What does Researched mean?

Researched means the review is built from seat maps, published specifications, current route and fleet data, and firsthand accounts from travelers who have flown it, but Jon has not sat in that seat himself. It is clearly labeled so you can weight it accordingly.

Do airlines pay for reviews?

No. No airline has paid for, sponsored, or previewed any review on this site. If that ever changes on a specific piece, for example a press seat offered to review a cabin that would otherwise be Researched, it will be disclosed on that review itself, in the body, not in a footer.

Where do the fare ranges come from?

From Jon's own fare tracking and from deal alert history, and every range on the site carries the month and year it was observed plus its source. A fare quoted without a date is not evidence, so we do not publish one.

Method

How we review

Every cabin review on this site is scored the same way, labeled for firsthand experience, and published with its affiliate relationships visible. Here is the whole method.

Flown, or Researched

This is the label that matters most, so it goes at the top of every review and on every card that links to one.

Flown

Jon has flown that exact airline, in that exact cabin, on a route to or from Europe. The first person in the review is literal. Same airline but a different cabin does not qualify, and neither does the same cabin on a different continent.

Researched

Built from seat maps, specifications, fleet and route data, and firsthand accounts from people who have flown it. Useful, and honestly labeled. Where a review is Researched, the writing does not use the first person about the seat.

The rubric

Seven dimensions, each scored 1 to 10, shown on the review as a scorecard. The headline number is their mean, so a cabin cannot hide a bad seat behind a good lounge.

Seat: Pitch, width, whether it goes flat, whether it goes flat in a direction you can sleep in, and how exposed the aisle seats are. A 1-2-1 business cabin and a 2-2-2 one are not the same product at the same price.
Service: Whether the crew is present when you need something, how they handle a full cabin, and whether the experience is the same on a Tuesday as it is on the marketing video.
Food: Quality, timing, and whether you can eat when you want to rather than when the cart arrives. Economy is scored against economy, not against business.
IFE: Screen size and responsiveness, the actual library, whether wifi works over the Atlantic and what it costs, and whether there is power at every seat.
Lounge: Scored for the lounge you get at the US departure airport, not the airline's flagship at its home hub, because that is the one you will be sitting in.
Ground: Check-in, security routing, boarding order, and how the airline behaves when something goes wrong. Recovery from a misconnect is part of the product.
Value: What the cabin costs in cash and in miles relative to what it delivers. A very good seat at an indefensible price scores badly here, and a merely decent seat at a fair price scores well.

Where the numbers come from

Fares.Jon’s own fare tracking on transatlantic routes, plus deal alert history. Every published range carries the month and year it was observed and its source, directly under the table. Airfare moves constantly, so a range is there to judge a quote against, not to promise a price.

Point valuations. Our own, deliberately conservative, and specific to transatlantic redemptions. Each carries a one-line basis, and they are reviewed quarterly and whenever a program devalues. They are published in full on the Points vs. Cash Calculator.

Routes and cabins.Airline schedules and fleet assignments, checked at the time of writing and re-checked on the refresh cadence in each page’s frontmatter. Aircraft swaps happen; where a route is served by more than one cabin product, the review says so.

Corrections. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did — on the corrections page, which lists every error this site has published, what a reader would have seen, and the check that caught it. The updated date on every page is real.

Checking our own numbers

Fares here are collected from one source. The obvious upgrade is to collect from two and say so, and we deliberately do not: the major flight search engines are metasearch over largely the same inventory, so a second pass buys much less independence than the phrase implies, and our carrier grid only works because every fare in it is captured for one fixed travel week in a single sitting. Doubling the collection would break the thing that makes it comparable.

So the second source is used the way a second source is genuinely useful — to measure whether the first one can be trusted, on a sample, with the result published.

Last run August 31, 2026 against Skyscanner: 10 routes, 1 exact to the dollar, 4 within one percent, median gap $12.50. One route was far enough out to be a bad row rather than fare movement, and it was — the fare was wrong, it is fixed, and it is on the corrections page with the check that caught it.

Stated plainly because it matters: this run was made 1 day after the data was collected, so it measures source disagreement and one day of fare movement together and cannot separate them. Only a same-day check isolates the first.

Money

This site earns money from affiliate links, chiefly deal-alert subscriptions, and from consulting and digital products sold directly. No airline has ever paid for coverage.

An affiliate relationship never changes a recommendation or the order of one. The full policy, including what we do if a press seat is ever offered, is on the affiliate disclosure page.

Common questions

What does Flown mean on a review?: Flown means Jon has personally flown that exact airline in that exact cabin on a route to or from Europe. Not the same airline in a different cabin, and not the same cabin on a different continent. If any of those change, the review is labeled Researched instead.
What does Researched mean?: Researched means the review is built from seat maps, published specifications, current route and fleet data, and firsthand accounts from travelers who have flown it, but Jon has not sat in that seat himself. It is clearly labeled so you can weight it accordingly.
Do airlines pay for reviews?: No. No airline has paid for, sponsored, or previewed any review on this site. If that ever changes on a specific piece, for example a press seat offered to review a cabin that would otherwise be Researched, it will be disclosed on that review itself, in the body, not in a footer.
Where do the fare ranges come from?: From Jon's own fare tracking and from deal alert history, and every range on the site carries the month and year it was observed plus its source. A fare quoted without a date is not evidence, so we do not publish one.

Method set by

Jon Miksis

Jon Miksis has run travel businesses since 2017 and spends 3–6 months a year traveling, two to three of them in Europe. He has taken 250+ flights and booked every one himself, and regularly flies Boston to Europe for under $300 round trip. Every “Flown” review is from his own seat.

How we review →About Jon →