Comfort for tall travelers

If you feel cramped when you fly, imagine the anguish if you were tall. For extra-tall business travelers, the discomfort continues long after the flight, as their feet dangle off the edge of hotel beds, forcing some to position their bodies diagonally, and as they dance what one tall traveler calls the "shower limbo" thanks to too-low shower heads.

"I truly believe it's a serious disconnect. I end up literally booking everything myself. Travel agents haven't a clue," said R.J. Brennan, director of strategic workplace for IA Interior Architects in its Chicago office, who is 6-foot-8. "In economy, my knees are embedded into the wire of the seat pocket — I'm literally wedged in and can't move. On some small planes, I have to physically get off the plane to take my coat off."

There is a little relief these days, both in the air and on the ground. Two years ago, SeatGuru.com introduced airline comparison charts, allowing readers to see at a glance "seat pitch" — the distance between the back of a seat and the seat in front of it, and the best indicator of legroom — in different classes and aircraft.

One SeatGuru feature allows readers to rearrange the alphabetical airline list by seat pitch, making it obvious that the bigger seat pitches in domestic economy class — 34 to 36 inches — are on United, JetBlue, Delta's MD-88 shuttle, Air Canada and Westjet. Because a seat pitch of only 29 inches to 30 inches is found in most airlines' economy class, this is no small thing.

This year, JetBlue reconfigured its planes to sell seats with 38 inches of seat pitch in six rows on its A320 fleet and the emergency exit row in its Embraer 190 planes for an extra $10 or more. (JetBlue's other seats with up to 36 inches of seat pitch in certain rows have no extra fee.)

In Premium Economy, offered by some airlines mostly on international flights, the discount British airline BMI is the hands-down winner, according to SeatGuru, with 49 inches of seat pitch on an Airbus A330-200.

The only hotel chain that seems to have staked out the tall traveler niche is Kimpton Hotels, which introduced its "tall rooms" with 96-inch beds, higher shower heads and higher door frames in 1995. Each hotel in Kimpton's Hotel Monaco chain has about 20 tall rooms, said Steve Pinetti, senior vice president of marketing.

Kimpton, which even sells its extra-long beds for $2,595 at www.kimptonstyle.com, plans to add Tall Rooms with the custom-made Sealy Postulux 700 beds to most of its new hotels, he added.

Other hotels that have tall-friendly rooms are the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, which has 48 rooms with 96-inch-long beds in its Palms tower and fantasy tower. (The owners, the Maloof family, are sensitive to the height issue because they are the majority owner of the National Basketball Association's Sacramento Kings.)

The W Hotel Dallas has 95-inch-long beds, taller doorways and higher shower heads, and Canoe Bay, a luxury resort in rural Wisconsin that has been used for corporate retreats, has 92-inch beds in three cottages, with plans for more.

But these hotels are exceptions. Most have king-size or queen-size beds (the U.S. industry standard for both is 80 inches long) or perhaps California Kings (84 inches).

"There is no difference in the length of the bed, but a queen is so much narrower it makes sleeping uncomfortable," complained Dan Sondhelm, a partner in SunStar, a financial services public relations firm in Alexandria, Va., who is 6-foot-4.

While many tall people say the travel industry seems to ignore them, they are not a tiny market. Five percent of men ages 20 to 74 in the United States are 6-foot-2 or taller, according to the most recent survey by the Centers for Disease Controls National Center for Health Statistics, conducted from 1999 to 2002.

Thomas C. Cambier, a 6-foot-8 lawyer at Hancock & Estabrook in Syracuse, N.Y., praised JetBlue for the roomy seats in its economy class. "Those few extra inches make all the difference in the world," he said.

Brennan said he usually flies United's Economy Plus, with higher-priced seats that offer up to five inches more legroom than its economy class, unless he is upgraded to first or business class, and rattled off choice seats like the authority he is. "Emergency exit row is a subtlety from airline to airline," he said. "Often the extra leg room is in the row behind it. On a Boeing 737-300, you want the row behind the exit row, in the window seat. On a Boeing 757, a totally different configuration, it's the exit row window seat."

But paying a steep price for their height rankles some travelers. "Special accommodations can be made, but often you pay more to get them," said Colin Hutt, president of Primum Marketing Communications in Milwaukee, who is 6-foot-4.

Tall women gripe, too. "The shower head is so low I do what I call the 'shower limbo,'" said Ann Marie Gothard, the 6-foot director of global communications for Orbis International, a nonprofit group that treats blindness in developing countries, of her hotel in Vietnam on a business trip. The mirror, she added, was "hung at chest-level, requiring me to squat down to see myself from the shoulders up."