Where to Find Accurate Airline Seat Maps

Websites that provide detailed airline seat maps are very useful for flyers.

Whether you’ve already booked a flight or you’re deciding between airlines, a comparison of seat and cabin features will help you choose the seat that best fits your needs. But only if the airline seat maps are accurate….

SeatGuru has been taken offline

SeatGuru was the go-to resource for years, with a large database of seat maps for 175 airlines. Many people liked the colour-coding where red means bad seat, green means good, and yellow raises questions.

Another loved feature was the customer reviews of individual seats, even though their accuracy was questionable when reviews were linked to an outdated layout of the aircraft cabin.

Unfortunately, SeatGuru stopped updating its seat maps at the start of the pandemic. Now, its owner Tripadvisor has finally decided to pull SeatGuru from the internet. If you go to the SeatGuru website today, you’ll see a message redirecting you to the Tripadvisor website.

Luckily, there are some good alternatives.

AeroLOPA has the most accurate airline seat maps

LOPA is an acronym for Layout of Passenger Accommodation and that’s what AeroLOPA is all about. Each airline seat map is drawn to scale, showing details even down to the exact position of the windows!

One thing that’s missing is that there is no grading of best/worst/questionable seats. You decide based on an accurate depiction of the cabin. This will appeal if you prefer to judge a seat based on your own criteria.

The growing AeroLOPA database – now at 191 airlines – includes the big internationals and most maps include the date of the latest update.

On SeatMaps (covered below), you can search for a seat map by entering your flight number, route and date. On AeroLOPA you search by airline and aircraft, so need to research that information elsewhere.

Seatmaps.com covers a wide range of airlines

Launched in 2020 by a German data company, Seatmaps.com boasts an impressive database of airlines.

Their seat maps use the same system of colour-coding as SeatGuru and you click on a seat for details such as seat pitch and width, recline, in-flight entertainment systems and WiFi. Some aircraft feature 3D views for an extra level of detail.

While the database is comprehensive and the website clean and easy to navigate, the information provided on airlines and cabins is generic at best, and comedically inaccurate at worst. That said, it does offer helpful photos and links to third-party reviews. Users can also submit a rating for a particular aircraft or seat.

ExpertFlyer offers real-time data

ExpertFlyer is a subscription-based service with a raft of useful tools for frequent flyers. Seat maps are available to view for free and you can see which seats are available on specific flights in real time. If an airline operates more than one configuration on the same aircraft type, this is also a way to check which one is scheduled to operate any given flight.

Subscribers can also set up alerts for specific seats and ExpertFlyer will notify you if/when a seat becomes available.

ExpertFlyer used to highlight particularly good and bad seats on its seat maps, using data from SeatGuru. As SeatGuru no longer exists, ExpertFlyer no longer does this.

Other websites with airline seat maps

Other options out there include SeatMaestro, whose Qantas A380 seat map is the old layout, and Seatlink.com, which aims to show the best-rated seats according to flyers.