SeatGuru Laid To Rest After 24 Years

I think it’s fair to say that SeatGuru might be one of the greatest airline travel tools ever invented. Created in 2001, SeatGuru provided aircraft seat maps for various airlines, including abundant information about each seat such as whether it had a window, the seat pitch and width, the amount of recline, whether it was too close to the galley, and so on.

They also included a feedback section allowing users to comment on their experience sitting in the seat, and even allowed members to upload photos. The biggest draw really was the fact that you could look up your flight number and get the matching seat map, giving you a pretty good idea what to expect. It wasn’t always perfect, but it worked most of the times, and just in time if you needed to make any last-minute seat changes.

SeatGuru was sold to online travel company TripAdvisor in 2007, and continued to grow, adding more and more airlines over the years. Even though a few competitors joined the scene trying to replicate SeatGuru’s success, they just never managed to cop the top spot, partly due to the amount of traffic TripAdvisor brought in.

However, SeatGuru’s quality would start to decline over the years, well before the pandemic. Some of the issues included very slow updates, a lack of new airlines being added, and seat maps listing incorrect information. Even their website looked like a bit of a throwback compared to some of the newer seat map sites.

In 2020, their mobile apps were delisted from the relative stores, with no major updates being made to the website in the last six years. On October 31, SeatGuru’s website was updated with a simple logo and text saying, “SeatGuru has closed down, please visit TripAdvisor to plan your next trip”.

SeatGuru’s closure is honestly not surprisingly, but it also part of TripAdvisor’s bigger strategy to reduce spending. They have started consolidation of a number of its subsidiaries, integrating all services under the TripAdvisor name. They also plan to cut its workforce and take advantage of the AI trned, with the bigger plan of yielding at least $85 million in annualized gross cost savings by 2027.

So, what do we use now? Even though there are a handful of sites competing in the seat map space, the two that keep coming up as favorites are SeatMaps and aeroLOPA. SeatMaps seems to be the closest to what SeatGuru offered, but I love aeroLOPA because they offer very detailed specs about the seats that they cover.

As neither is a perfect replacement, I’d say use them both in tandem to paint a better picture of what you can expect.

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