An Alternative to SeatGuru

If you ask any frequent flyer what their top five travel websites are, there’s no doubt SeatGuru will be on the list. It’s a site that gives advice on which plane seats people should try to get or avoid (and more).

However, since TripAdvisor bought them, they’ve kind of fallen off. Not all of their seat maps are accurate or updated. Shocking I know. But for example, I just flew on an American Airlines 777-200 and SeatGuru almost cost me a valuable systemwide upgrade because they hadn’t updated their seat map to include American’s new Premium Economy Seats—and it’s been over a year since AA introduced those.

The experience made me realize that you can’t always trust SeatGuru, so I started looking for alternatives. One I found is SeatLink, which is still in beta. Although they too haven’t updated American’s 777-200, I kind of like their layout better.

SeatLink is better if you don’t know your aircraft types, since you can just list your city pairs, airline and dates and it will bring up the flights and equipment for that day. You can also search by flight number (SeatGuru does this too but SeatLink’s is sleeker). It will be interesting to see if these guys can do a better job than SeatGuru in the long run, but they aren’t there yet. For now it’s at least worth cross-referencing them to see which plane or row has the most legroom, recline, seat width, pitch, or power ports. SeatLink also lists in-flight entertainment and Wi-Fi and allows users to rate individual seats and upload photos.

Bottom line: The best map to trust for the seat configuration is the airline’s own seat map. But for added precision, you can check these two review sites to see if they match up. If they do, you can then see which seats/rows are the best.