The matching circles in MeetInPlane
Published: 2026-08-16
Most apps that connect one person with another show you a number. 87% match. Nobody knows where it came from, nobody can argue with it, and nobody can act on it - what exactly would you do differently at 74%? The number looks like the result of a calculation. It is decoration.
MeetInPlane has no percentages. It has reasons: a specific sentence saying what the two of you actually have in common. "Same flight LO433, 25 August". "Same neighbourhood: El Born". A reason can be checked and it can be dismissed - which is exactly what makes it worth something. Those reasons fall into five matching circles, and this piece walks through each of them: what it means, how I know it, and what to do to end up inside it.
The first two circles work on a free account, so that is where I start. The other three come with Premium Trip.
Circle 1: Same flight
The hardest of the five, because it rests on no declaration at all - only on a flight number. Two trips land in this circle when the carrier, the flight number and the departure date all agree. Not "a similar flight", not "the same destination on the same day": the exact same aircraft, the exact same date.
It is the only circle with no room for coincidence. If the app says you are flying together, you are flying together - in a few weeks you will sit in the same cabin, wait at the same gate and collect your bags from the same belt. That is why it is free: it is the MeetInPlane promise in its purest form, and I do not want to sell it.
When is the circle empty? When your trip has no flight on it. Without a flight number I have nothing to compare - and you lose not one circle but two, because the airport circle works off the flight times as well.
Circle 2: Same destination and dates
This is where everything that happens after landing lives. Two trips meet in this circle when their dates overlap and they lead to the same place - and "the same place" is not a name, it is a set of airports. The Costa Brava has no airport of its own, Andalusia has several, and you can still search for either one here. I wrote that mechanism up separately in "Where are we flying? But what does 'where' even mean?".
This is the broadest of the five and the only one that always works - a destination and dates are enough, which is the minimum you enter when creating a trip anyway. It is also the most interesting one on longer trips: somebody flying to Mallorca three days after you but staying a fortnight shares ten days on the ground with you, even though you will never meet on a plane.
That is why the match card says more than "same city" - it says exactly how many days you have in common. Fifteen shared days is a different situation from one, and you are the one who decides which is worth a message.
Circle 3: Same airport at a similar time Premium
The circle for everyone who is not on your plane and will still spend an hour in the same building as you. It covers two situations, and only those two: a shared departure or a shared landing, within a three-hour window either way.
A shared departure is, say, you flying Warsaw to Barcelona at 10:00 and somebody flying Warsaw to Madrid at 11:30. Different destination, different aircraft, but the same check-in queue, the same security lane and the same gate area. A shared landing is the mirror image: you land in Barcelona at 13:00, somebody else lands there twenty minutes later coming from Kraków - you meet at the baggage belt and you have the same problem getting into town.
What this circle deliberately does not do: it never pairs somebody departing with somebody arriving. That would look like a match without being one. Departures and arrivals are usually on different levels of the terminal, with different cafés, on opposite sides of security - two such people can be fifty metres apart vertically with nowhere at all to meet. So the card says which of the two cases applies: "Departing from the same airport WAW around the same time" or "Landing at the same airport BCN around the same time".
Three hours is not a number plucked from the air: that is roughly how long a sensible airport wait runs, from check-in to boarding. More on which phase of an airport people actually meet in is in "Matched. Now what? The six phases of an airport".
Circle 4: Same hotel or neighbourhood Premium
This circle compares where you sleep: the same city, overlapping stay dates, and either the same hotel or the same neighbourhood. If you are both in El Born from 25 August, an evening out or a shared transfer from the airport stops being theoretical.
It is also the circle where most of the privacy work went, so here is exactly how it behaves. The hotel name is not held in the database in any form you could search - it is encrypted, and what gets compared is a cryptographic digest of it. The app can therefore establish that two people are staying in the same hotel without being able to read which one. The name itself only appears once both sides have chosen hotel-level visibility; on the default setting the other person sees the neighbourhood and nothing more.
If you would rather not give even a neighbourhood, you do not have to - the circle simply stays empty. That is a choice, not a condition of using the app.
Circle 5: Shared plans and intents Premium
The four circles above say where you will be. This one alone says what for. There are eleven intents to pick from - pre-flight chat and waiting at the airport together, sharing a transfer, a meal together and sightseeing, through to business networking and text contact only. The circle connects people heading to the same place at the same time who ticked at least one intent in common.
The value of this circle is mostly negative, and that is a compliment: it saves you the conversations that were never going to work. If you are looking for company to explore Madrid with and the other person ticked text contact only, you both see it before the first message rather than after three days of polite small talk.
It is also the only circle that depends entirely on you - not on an airline, not on a hotel, not on whether you have a ticket yet. Ticking your intents takes about fifteen seconds.
Why a reason, not a percentage
A match card in MeetInPlane looks roughly like this:
Same flight LO433 (25 Aug)
15 shared days in Barcelona
Same neighbourhood: El Born
You both speak: Polish, English
Shared intents: Sightseeing, Sharing a transfer
Every one of those lines can be verified and every one can be rejected. You may decide the shared flight means nothing to you but the shared neighbourhood does - or the other way round. A percentage makes that decision impossible, because it blends everything into one number and takes away your right to disagree. Reasons are also more honest towards me: you cannot use them to pretend the app knows more about two people than it actually does.
What the circles do not show
Matches are only computed on active trips, and more drops out of the results than you might expect. You will not see your own trips, people you have blocked - or people who have blocked you (a block works both ways and never tells the other person), hidden profiles, or anyone in incognito mode. Incognito does not restrict what you see: it only stops others seeing you.
Some things are deliberately outside the circles altogether - your seat number and your booking details. They are not needed to establish that you are flying together, so I show them to nobody.
When there are no matches yet
On a new route somebody has to be first, and sometimes that will be you. An empty list does not mean you should keep coming back to refresh it - in both of those situations you get an e-mail instead of an empty screen.
If you already have a trip and nobody matches it yet, there is nothing for you to do: the trip is visible to others and I write to you on the day somebody matching turns up. Premium only gets mentioned once there is somebody to show - pushing an upgrade at zero results would be selling an empty box.
If you do not have an account yet, the search on the home page works the same way: you check a route, and when nobody is heading that way yet you can leave an e-mail address. I then send one message - the one where there is finally somebody to meet.
What is free and what is Premium
Without paying you get Same flight and Same destination and dates - everything you need to meet somebody from your own plane and somebody who will be in the same city in the same week. That is not a demo, it is a complete scenario.
Premium Trip adds the other three circles: the airport at a similar time, the hotel or neighbourhood and shared intents. You pay once for one specific trip, with no subscription - Premium runs from purchase until seven days after you return.
How to end up in more circles
Enter your flight number. One action that unlocks two circles at once - the shared flight and the shared airport. Without it the first circle has nothing to compare and the second does not know your times.
Add where you sleep, even if only the neighbourhood. You do not have to name a hotel; a neighbourhood is enough to switch the circle on.
Tick your intents. Fifteen seconds, and it filters out the conversations that lead nowhere.
And the simplest one: add your trip early. Circles are recomputed continuously, so a trip added three months before departure has three months for somebody to turn up in it. Added the night before - one evening.
Frequently asked questions
Can other people see my flight number?
They can see that you are on the same flight, which is the entire point of that circle. They cannot see your seat number or your booking details - those take no part in matching.
What does "a similar time" mean at an airport?
Three hours either way, counted either from your departure or from your landing. Departures are compared with departures and arrivals with arrivals, never one against the other: two people on opposite sides of security would have nowhere to meet anyway.
Do I have to give my hotel for anyone to find me?
No. The other four circles work without a stay. If you want to switch the fifth one on, a neighbourhood is enough - the hotel name is optional and is only shown to the other person if you both allow it.
Why do I have zero matches?
Usually one of three reasons: the trip is still a draft rather than active; it has no flight and no stay on it, so three circles have nothing to compare; or you are simply first on that route. In that last case there is nothing to do and no reason to come back - I will e-mail you when somebody matching appears.
A match is information, not a verdict
The five circles do not tell you who to meet. They tell you what you have in common, and leave the question of whether that is worth one message to you. That is all an app promising that somebody is flying where you are should be doing. I build MeetInPlane on my own, so these decisions are mine too, and I can lay them out here without hedging.
If you already have a destination and dates, create a free MeetInPlane account and see how many circles you land in.