SeatGuru Closes After 24 Years (Here's What to Use Instead)

If you tried visiting SeatGuru on 31st October 2025, you were met with a simple message: "SeatGuru has closed down, please visit TripAdvisor to plan your next trip." After 24 years of helping travellers pick better seats, the pioneering website has officially shut its doors.

For many of us in the miles and points community, this feels like the end of an era. I remember consulting SeatGuru religiously before every flight, checking those familiar green, yellow, and red colour codes to avoid the dreaded seats with limited recline or misaligned windows. But truthfully? This closure has been a long time coming.

SeatGuru launched in October 2001, featuring colour-coded seat maps showing green for good seats, yellow for "be aware", and red for bad seats. The website was acquired by TripAdvisor in 2007, and that's where things started to go downhill.

TripAdvisor stopped investing in SeatGuru around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, with the last seat map update published on 16th March 2020. For over five years, the site sat there with increasingly outdated information, showing aircraft configurations that no longer existed whilst missing newer layouts entirely.

I'll be honest – I'd already stopped using SeatGuru ages ago. The last few times I checked it against actual airline seat maps, the information was completely wrong. Singapore Airlines' A380 configurations, British Airways' refurbished aircraft, Qatar Airways' QSuites rollout – none of it was reflected on SeatGuru. It became more misleading than helpful.

When SeatGuru launched, passengers weren't charged extra fees for most seat assignments. However, airlines have now started charging passengers for reserving seats of their preference, including aisle or window seats, and even seats towards the front of the cabin labelled as "preferred" come with a higher price tag.

This makes knowing the actual layout of a plane more important than ever. The last thing you want is to pay £30 for a "premium" seat only to discover it doesn't recline, has a misaligned window, or sits right next to the galley where crew will be clattering about all night.

When you're redeeming precious Avios or spending your hard-earned points on business class, you deserve to know exactly what you're getting. That's where modern alternatives come in.

Rather than mourning SeatGuru's demise, let's focus on the silver lining: the alternatives available today are actually better than SeatGuru ever was.

This is our top recommendation for anyone booking a flight. FlightSeatmap.com shows you real-time seat availability for your specific flight.

Unlike SeatGuru's static maps, you can see exactly which seats are already taken, which are available, and which are blocked. This is invaluable when you're trying to snag that perfect empty row in economy or avoid sitting next to someone in business class.

The site covers hundreds of airlines and updates in real-time. Simply enter your flight number, and you'll see the actual seatmap for your specific aircraft on your specific date. No more guessing whether the seat map you're looking at matches the plane you'll actually be flying on.

Aerolopa is excellent, with far more realistic seat maps than SeatGuru ever had, though it doesn't have seat-by-seat recommendations like the old green/yellow/red system.

What Aerolopa does brilliantly is show you the exact layout of different aircraft variants. You can see precise window alignments, galley locations, lavatory positions, and even the exact specifications like seat pitch and width. The visual representations are far more detailed than SeatGuru's ever were.

The only downside? You'll need to identify your specific aircraft variant yourself by checking the number of rows and comparing it to your airline's published information. It takes a bit more effort, but the accuracy is worth it.

SeatMaps.com is another solid option that includes colour-coding similar to SeatGuru's original system, along with user reviews and 360-degree photos for some aircraft. It's worth checking if you want that familiar good/bad/average classification.

FlyerTalk forums remain an excellent resource for seat-specific advice, particularly for less common aircraft or routes. The community is incredibly knowledgeable and often shares recent first-hand experiences.

Since I stopped trusting SeatGuru a few years ago, I've been using FlightSeatmap.com for nearly every booking. It's genuinely helped me avoid some absolute disasters.

For researching less familiar aircraft – like when I was looking into Gulf Air's 787-9 configuration for my recent Falcon Gold review – Aerolopa was invaluable. The detailed specifications helped me understand exactly what to expect.

Whilst it's sad to see SeatGuru officially close after serving frequent flyers for nearly a quarter century, the truth is that it had become more of a liability than an asset in recent years. The modern alternatives available today offer better, more accurate, and more useful information.

My advice? Bookmark FlightSeatmap.com for real-time availability checking when you're actually booking seats, and use Aerolopa when you want to research aircraft types and specifications in detail. Between these two tools, you'll have everything SeatGuru used to offer – and more.

If you're planning award bookings and want to find the best flights to begin with, don't forget to check out our Award Travel Finder tool as well. There's no point picking the perfect seat if you can't find award availability in the first place!

Have you already switched to using these alternatives? Or are you still mourning SeatGuru's demise? Let me know on Instagram – I'd love to hear which tools you're finding most useful.