One of the oldest online tools that frequent flyers relied on has finally shut down. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, but I also can’t make sense of why it had to be this way…
After nearly 25 years, SeatGuru shuts down
SeatGuru was launched all the way back in 2001, and I think just about any frequent flyer is familiar with the tool (well, maybe some young people are less familiar with it, but at least a decade ago, everyone used it). SeatGuru would show you the seat maps of most aircraft types, with notes about which seats are good and bad.
Given what a widely used resource this was, TripAdvisor ended up acquiring SeatGuru in 2007. You can see how owning SeatGuru could be an asset for TripAdvisor, in terms of getting people onto the site. However, it seems that it became less and less of a focus over time, and in early 2020, SeatGuru published new seat maps for the last time.
So for over five years, the SeatGuru website was up, but with no updates to seat maps. Well, that has now changed, as noted by DansDeals. When you go to seatguru.com, you’ll now see a message that “SeatGuru has closed down,” encouraging people to go to TripAdvisor instead (which… doesn’t offer the same advice).
I get that maybe this wasn’t the biggest priority for TripAdvisor (and Expedia, by extension), but I really don’t understand why they didn’t just keep it running. It doesn’t take that much work to update seat maps, when you consider the potential amount of traffic it can generate.
You’d think that having the most widely used airplane seat map resource would be a useful tie-in for any online travel agency. Admittedly direct revenue opportunities are otherwise pretty limited, aside from impression based ads, and some referrals to other businesses in parallel spaces.
While I’m symbolically sad to see SeatGuru discontinued, I can’t say that I’ve used the site in the past several years. As I’ve covered in the past, nowadays aeroLOPA is the best website for airplane seat maps.
No, aeroLOPA doesn’t color code seats as “good” or “bad,” but I consider it to be much more useful than that, since you can actually draw your own conclusions based on the seat maps. aeroLOPA shows the exact locations of windows, and publishes seat information and details to a much higher level of specificity than SeatGuru ever did.
Bottom line
SeatGuru has finally shut down, after not seeing any changes for over five years. It’s the end of an era, but I guess it got to the point where the information was so outdated that it wasn’t even worth keeping up anymore.
It’s odd that TripAdvisor bought SeatGuru, only to essentially give up on it. But sadly that happens all too often when big companies acquire smaller players.
What do you make of SeatGuru being shut down?
