SeatGuru closed in October 2025 after almost two decades as the default place travellers checked before picking a seat. For a lot of people searching for a replacement, the honest answer is: no single site has fully replaced it, and that is worth understanding before you trust any of them, including this one.
What actually made SeatGuru useful
It was never really the colour-coded maps. It was the fact that someone had already done the work of figuring out which seats had a real complaint attached to them — the ones that did not recline, the ones next to a galley, the ones with a wing blocking the window — and put that in plain English next to a seat number.
The maps aged badly for a specific reason: airlines change cabin configurations, and a single popular route or aircraft type is often flown in two, three, or more genuinely different layouts at once. SeatGuru increasingly showed one map per aircraft type, when the real answer was "it depends which specific plane you get." That gap between one map and several real configurations is what we mean elsewhere on this site by a version lottery, and it is the single biggest reason seat map sites lose people's trust.
What to check on any seat map site now
Does it tell you how confident it is? A number with no source is a guess wearing a costume. Look for a site that distinguishes between "we confirmed this against the airline's own materials" and "we are estimating."
Does it acknowledge that one aircraft type can have several different cabins? If a site shows you a single map for "Boeing 777-300ER" with no mention of which specific configuration, it is quietly picking one for you and hoping it is right.
Does it explain why a seat is good or bad, not just colour it green or red? "Avoid" without a reason is not useful when the actual issue — no recline, a lavatory next door, a misaligned window — might matter more or less to you specifically.
| What to check | What it looks like when a site does this properly |
|---|---|
| A confidence level, not one blanket claim | Each map is labelled verified, derived or provisional, with the difference explained |
| A named source | A link to where the configuration actually came from, not "our data" |
| Version-lottery awareness | Every real cabin layout for an aircraft type is shown, not just one |
| A reason attached to every rating | Plain English for why a seat is rated the way it is, not just a colour |
| A visible last-checked date | When the map was last verified, not left undated so staleness is invisible |
How we approach it here
Every cabin configuration on this site carries a confidence rating — verified, derived, or provisional — and the source it came from. Where an airline flies more than one configuration on the same aircraft type, we say so explicitly and show you the alternatives, rather than picking one and hoping. Where we cannot determine something, including which exact aircraft is operating a given flight, we say that too, plainly, rather than guessing.
None of that makes the maps perfect. Airlines change fleets constantly and our data ages the moment it is published, the same as anyone else's. What we can promise is that the confidence label on a given config means what it says.
Is this site affiliated with SeatGuru?
No. SeatGuru was owned by TripAdvisor and shut down independently of anything to do with this site. We built Best Plane Seats afterwards, from scratch, using our own generated seat-map pipeline — we did not acquire, inherit, or copy any part of SeatGuru's data or maps, and we never would; airline seat-map artwork and any compiled seat-map database belong to whoever built them.
Will you definitely have my specific flight?
Not yet, for every route — we are adding airlines and aircraft types on an ongoing basis, prioritising the carriers and routes UK travellers actually fly. If your airline or aircraft is not covered yet, that is an honest gap, not a hidden one, and you can tell us which one to prioritise next via the contribute page.