Not by flight number. Each room has the airline and depart/destination airport as their key. A chatroom per airport would be an easy change, but would be a bit of a departure from what I intended the app to do. For example, the difference in customer service standards between British Airways flights across long haul and short haul products is huge. Almost night and day by my amateur reckoning.
I want to draw this kind of info out of the customer base.
As you don't need the flight number, the idea is that customers on the flight itself can make use of the realtime chat when appropriate, but prospective travellers can also peek into a room, review the chat, and ask a few questions like a regular forum.
I think you'd be better off trying to get a general flight chat off the ground first, before you worry about grouping people into individual chats per flight. Hard enough to bootstrap that, but if you did, I would recommend adding tags for Flight Numbers, Airlines, and Airport Codes, and attach those tags to the messages in the chat (as badges next above the message). Ask the user what their next upcoming flight details are. Let the user save those deets. Then once you've gotten enough users and the chat room gets noisy enough, introduce filters, where you can filter by airport code, flight number, airline, etc. Bootstrapping is hard, but I would promote the chat in various subreddits and facebook groups and consumer discussion forums or any interest groups about flying and travel in general.
I want to draw this kind of info out of the customer base.
As you don't need the flight number, the idea is that customers on the flight itself can make use of the realtime chat when appropriate, but prospective travellers can also peek into a room, review the chat, and ask a few questions like a regular forum.
Here's an example of how I'd like to see the app used - https://quixical.com/channel/b41eb89fca20a5ca422d9c6ffac1577...