Frequent flyers and travel hackers who visited SeatGuru on October 31 were met with an unpleasant surprise: a shuttered website directing them to Tripadvisor’s homepage. After nearly a quarter-century in operation, the beloved website that helped fliers determine which seats to grab, and which to avoid, is gone. Here’s why, and three SeatGuru alternatives to try now.
What was SeatGuru?
SeatGuru was a website highly regarded by frequent fliers. The site hosted seatmaps for thousands of airplanes and categorized every seat on each aircraft in order to help fliers figure out which to book and which to avoid. “Good” seats were those with qualities like the most legroom in their class, the deepest unobstructed recline, and amenities like power ports. “Bad” seats were those with limited recline, proximity to the toilets, or obstructed windows.
Since airlines rarely made customers aware of the drawbacks of certain seats, and priced them similarly to preferable ones, there was always some risk involved when selecting your seat while booking. SeatGuru took that uncertainty away. By visiting the site, you could pull up the exact make and model of your airplane for a selected flight and click any seat to see whether it’s good, bad, or something in between. You could then use the data SeatGuru provided to choose the seat that works best for you.
SeatGuru was founded in 2001 and was one of those websites that exemplified the promise of the early internet: that newly accessible data could help improve our lives in many small ways. In SeatGuru’s case, it meant frequent travelers could make more informed choices about which seats to select.
SeatGuru became so popular that in 2007, travel website king Tripadvisor acquired it. But now, 18 years after the acquisition, and 24 years after its founding, SeatGuru is no more.
What happened to SeatGuru?
While once a reliable repository of seat data, SeatGuru began to take a turn for the worse when the Covid pandemic started. Around 2020, SeatGuru stopped producing content for its blog, delisted its smartphone apps from app stores, and fell behind in publishing the latest seat map data, leading the site’s data to become increasingly unreliable.
Still, even until this year, provided the configuration of any plane’s seat did not change, SeatGuru remained a valuable resource for frequent travelers hoping to find the best seats on their flight. But then, on October 31, with no notice and no fanfare, Tripadvisor pulled the plug on SeatGuru. Now, visitors to the site are redirected to Tripadvisor’s homepage.
As for why, a Tripadvisor spokesperson told me that the company’s pivot to AI initiatives was a driving factor in SeatGuru’s decline. “Tripadvisor has been evolving its business for its next era of growth, one that is centered on experiences and powered by AI,” the spokesperson told me. “We’ve been focusing strictly on optimizing our legacy offerings, and deprioritizing areas of the business as we shift resources towards our marketplace growth opportunities.”
SeatGuru was one of the areas the company felt should be deprioritized.
3 SeatGuru alternatives to try
SeatGuru may be joining many of its fellow useful websites from the early 2000s in the internet graveyard, but there are other ways to learn about a seat before you book it.
The first is SeatMap.com. The site was launched in 2022 and was founded by AMD and Microsoft veteran Djois Franklin and Fred Finn. Finn has the distinction of holding two travel-related Guinness World Records: most airmiles flown by a passenger and the person who has flown the most flights on the Concorde.
SeatMap hosts seat maps for planes operated by more than 750 airlines worldwide and categorizes each seat by color, based on comfort and amenities. In an email, SeatMap CEO Djois Franklin told me that the site was seeing a “sharp uptick” in traffic across the globe after SeatGuru shut down. To use SeatMap, just enter your flight information, and you’ll be presented with an interactive diagram of your flight’s seatmap.
A second website SeatGuru fans should try is AeroLOPA. The site, founded in 2021, doesn’t have the interactivity of SeatGuru or SeatMap.com (meaning you can’t click on an individual seat to learn more about it), but you can look up specifc planes in the fleets of nearly 200 airlines to find detailed cabin maps showing the relative positions of all seats along with general information about any cabin’s seat widths, recline, legroom, and more.
Finally, those wanting more social feedback about the best and worst seats should give SeatLink.com a look. The site lets you look up your specific flight, as SeatGuru did, and shows an interactive map detailing the amenities of each seat. SeatLink also lets users post comments about individual seats, enabling crowdsourced reviews and other socially aggregated data.