The Information to SeatGuru (And What to Reference As a substitute)

For many years, SeatGuru was a go-to useful resource for locating up-to-date airline seat maps and plane info. SeatGuru reviews that over ten million vacationers relied on SeatGuru to find out which airline seat to decide on.

Nevertheless, SeatGuru’s glory days appear to be behind it. This is what you have to find out about when to nonetheless use SeatGuru — and a few alternate options you may wish to try as a substitute.

What’s SeatGuru?

Because the title implies, SeatGuru holds itself out because the “guru” for airline seat suggestions. It makes use of an easy-to-understand color-coded scale to indicate which airplane seats are fascinating, which seats vacationers ought to be cautious about selecting and which seats to keep away from.

The positioning was launched in October 2001 by frequent flier Matthew Daimler and was bought by TripAdvisor in 2007. SeatGuru boasts “greater than 700 airplane seat maps from practically 100 completely different airways.”

Nevertheless, vacationers ought to be cautious about relying on these seat maps as a result of sadly, SeatGuru is not the up-to-date useful resource that it was.

SeatGuru makes use of a four-colored scale to point how fascinating a seat is:

• Inexperienced signifies a better-than-average seat. A seat might be marked inexperienced for quite a lot of causes together with having additional legroom, a lacking close by seat or having a bigger footwell in a enterprise class.

• White to point a regular seat that SeatGuru believes is not any higher or worse than the typical seat in that cabin.

• Yellow is for “bear in mind.” This seat may need a lacking window, restricted legroom, no recline or be situated close to a galley or toilet.

• Purple for a “unhealthy seat” — one which SeatGuru recommends avoiding. The seat usually must have a couple of unfavorable function to be highlighted purple.

SeatGuru can even use a mixture of colours to point {that a} seat has combined opinions. For instance, a half-green, half-yellow seat has constructive and unfavorable options. In the meantime, a half-yellow, half-red seat suggests the seat is not fairly as unhealthy as a purple seat however is worse than an all-yellow seat.

In all instances, customers can hover over a seat to get extra particulars about what options — or lack thereof — earned the seat its colour.

What occurred to SeatGuru?

Indications are that TripAdvisor stopped investing in SeatGuru across the begin of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

SeatGuru stopped publishing or updating weblog posts as of March 2020, with the final seat map replace revealed on March 16, 2020. Shortly after, the location’s major creator and media consultant departed the corporate. The SeatGuru app has additionally been pulled from the Apple and Google Play app shops.

A number of indications on SeatGuru’s web site present it stopped updating seat map info in 2020. For instance, SeatGuru nonetheless lists the Airbus A330-200 in American Airways’ fleet. Nevertheless, American Airways introduced that it had retired its Airbus A330-200 in late 2020.

In the meantime, Delta Air Strains took supply of its first Airbus A220-300 plane again in 2021. Nevertheless, SeatGuru nonetheless hasn’t revealed a seat map for this plane sort — solely itemizing the A220-100 which was first delivered to Delta again in 2018.

Alternate options to SeatGuru

If SeatGuru does not have an up to date seat map for the plane you are flying, fortunately, vacationers have alternate options.

Arguably one of the best different to SeatGuru is AeroLopa. “LOPA” stands for Location of Passenger Lodging and is a doc that airways put together for every cabin format. What AeroLopa does is digitize this doc, giving vacationers a precise to-scale format of the inside of every plane sort.

In some ways, this info is even higher than what SeatGuru supplies, as you may see the precise location of home windows and particulars like misaligned seats.

As an illustration, vacationers might wish to be cautious about choosing seat 10C within the seat map above. Whereas they are able to stretch out their legs in-flight, the uncovered seat location means your knees may get smacked by different vacationers’ luggage throughout boarding.

AeroLopa presently supplies these detailed seat maps for over 130 airways — spanning from Aegean Airways to Zipair — and it pledges to develop to extra airways because it will get correct and dependable particulars.

AeroLopa has received over aviation nerds with particulars just like the seat pitch, seat producer and sort, Wi-Fi supplier, in-flight leisure particulars and even particulars about seat coloring.

Nevertheless, AeroLopa has its limitations. For instance, seats aren’t color-coded to point good or unhealthy. As a substitute, vacationers want to find out this by wanting on the seat map for lacking home windows or close by loos or galleys.

The opposite limitation is that AeroLopa does not present the flexibility to lookup an plane seat map by flight quantity — as SeatGuru nonetheless does. As a substitute, you will want to have a look at the main points of your flight to determine which plane sort you are flying.

If the airline makes use of completely different seating configurations for a similar plane sort, you will want to match the seat map on the airline’s web site to AeroLopa to determine which model you are flying.

As SeatGuru wound down updates in 2020, SeatMaps took up the mantle. The German-based firm claims to “work straight with all airline producers” and has used that data to compile over 2,700 plane seat maps for greater than 700 airways.

Like SeatGuru, SeatMaps supplies an in depth color-coded seat map with particulars such because the variety of seats in every cabin, seat pitch, seat width and even how a lot the seat reclines. SeatMaps additionally has 360-degree pictures for some plane varieties.

Along with curated content material, SeatMaps additionally accepts user-submitted content material and hyperlinks to video opinions of plane from trusted YouTube reviewers like Merely Aviation.

Is SeatGuru price utilizing anymore?

For years, SeatGuru was a go-to useful resource for locating up-to-date seat maps and plane info. Sadly, the location’s homeowners have not invested to maintain up key info — even for main U.S. airways like American Airways and Delta.

You may nonetheless discover helpful info on SeatGuru, notably within the user-generated seat reviews. Nevertheless, different websites — corresponding to AeroLopa or SeatMaps — do a a lot better job of publishing up to date airline seat maps. So, we advocate cross-referencing different assets and never solely counting on SeatGuru.