SeatGuru

» see seatguru.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

seatguru knew that on a particular airline's 737 there was one seat with no window behind it, and that the row in front of the exit did not recline. that is not general knowledge. you learn it by flying the same aircraft often enough to develop opinions, or by reading somebody who has.

the flying most people do from here is ankara to istanbul, an hour in the air, and on that flight none of it matters. seatguru was built by and for people who spend eleven hours in a metal tube several times a month and have therefore arrived at a firm position on seat 44k. i have never had a position on seat 44k. the site is still worth a grave, because it is the kind of thing the early web was good at and the current one has mostly stopped doing: one obsessive assembling a reference nobody was being paid to assemble.

matthew daimler launched it in october 2001 because he was a business traveler and wanted the answer. it grew into a database of well over a thousand aircraft layouts covering more than a hundred and sixty carriers, put together from airline configuration data and from readers writing in with what they had found in row 30. tripadvisor bought it on 1 march 2007, back when tripadvisor was still a division of expedia.

~ the case file ~

~ the color code ~

the mechanism was a colored overlay on top of a diagram. green meant a seat better than the others around it and red meant do not book this one. yellow sat between them, something to check before committing. hovering gave you the reason in a sentence: a misaligned window, or reduced width because the entertainment box eats the footwell.

airlines had always published seat maps. what they published was geometry. seatguru published judgment on top of the geometry, and judgment is the part that is expensive to produce and impossible to automate. it also happened to be judgment the airline had every incentive not to give you, since the bad seats have to be sold to somebody.

~ the data that stopped ~

a seat map database is not an archive, it is a maintenance obligation. carriers reconfigure cabins constantly and take deliveries with layouts nobody has mapped yet. a map that was correct in 2019 is not merely old by 2024, it is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that looks authoritative because the page still renders the same green and red it always did.

seatguru published new maps for the last time in early 2020. the blog stopped in march of that year and the mobile apps went away around the same time. the pages kept ranking in search for another five years, sending people to configurations that no longer existed. on 31 october 2025 tripadvisor put up a notice reading that seatguru has closed down and pointed the domain at its own homepage, which is the least it could have done and also the last thing it did.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »