What replaced SeatGuru, and what 2LNR does instead

SeatGuru was a Tripadvisor property, and Tripadvisor closed it on October 31, 2025 after a 24-year run. Visiting seatguru.com today redirects you straight to tripadvisor.com, so the site offers no login, no archived library and no read-only version to fall back on. We re-checked the domain itself on September 30, 2026. There's no official successor product from Tripadvisor either. Every fact in this paragraph comes from the coverage linked in Sources.

The shutdown was the formality. Reporting at the time noted the seat-map library had not been updated since early 2020, so by the end it was describing cabins that had been refitted, retired, or swapped for different aircraft, roughly five years out of date. A static library is only as good as the day it was last maintained.

Its interface was the good part. Pick an airline, pick an aircraft, see the whole cabin color-coded, and read what other travelers said about row 31: that interface taught a lot of flyers that a seat number is a decision. Because the library was organized by aircraft rather than by flight, you could research a cabin you had no ticket for, which is useful when you're comparing two itineraries. The shutdown took both the seat ratings and the traveler comments under them.

SeatGuru answered "what is this cabin like" and "which row should I avoid" from a library of rated seat maps and traveler comments. It never answered "which seats are free on my flight right now", because it didn't read live inventory. Those are separate jobs, and they now have separate answers.

For the first job, browsing a cabin on an aircraft you haven't booked, a maintained library like AeroLOPA is our recommendation too. 2LNR publishes no cabin diagrams and no static seat-comfort ratings by aircraft type. What it does publish is the half of that question it can prove: which aircraft an airline actually flies and on which routes, in seat maps by airline and aircraft, worked out from its own schedule data. That narrows down what's likely on your route. It doesn't draw the cabin.

For the second job, a library keyed to an aircraft type can't help, and one that stopped being maintained can't even keep the layout right. 2LNR reads the seat map for the specific flight and date you're looking at, so what you see reflects the aircraft actually assigned and the seats actually open when you ask. An aircraft swap shows up as a different map instead of a wrong one. It scores the open seats within your own cabin and surfaces the best few, so the answer is "12A, window, and it is free right now" rather than "row 12 is generally good", and paid seats are labeled as paid rather than quietly hidden. The how-to lives in the airline seat maps guide.

Cabins churn in the last days before departure, and that's the moment a static library could never catch. If you're booked, put a seat monitor on the flight. 2LNR keeps reading the map and tells you when a check finds a better seat open in your cabin or when the seat you hold changes underneath you, alongside upgrade and award tracking on the same account. Seat monitoring is included with Pro, along with the full 331-day horizon on both matrices; how it works is on the seat monitoring page.