Accurate airline seat maps can be hard to find, and when taking that long overseas flight, getting the right seat is important. After all, nobody wants to be sat across from the toilet for 14 hours straight!
Possibly worse is selecting a window seat and then finding there’s no window in your row. To add insult to injury, you may even have paid for that seat. So how do you work out exactly what seats are where?
Airline Seating Plans Vary A Lot
When you select a seat online, you’re presented with a rudimentary seating plan. The most detail you get is what seat is beside what other seat, plus an indication of the toilets, galleys and doors – if you’re lucky. It’s hardly an architectural plan, that’s for sure.
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- Online seat selection screens from three leading carriers. Any guesses which airlines they are?
British Airways go so far as to have a disclaimer when selecting a seat. It says, “The seat plan is for guidance only and not true to scale. Extra space between rows does not indicate extra legroom.” Okay then! What about the published plans on airline websites?
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- Japan Airlines seating plans are pretty good – to scale and the missing windows are marked.
Some are quite good, showing things pretty much to scale. Others are pretty bad – looking at you Aer Lingus – and special mention to British Airways who snobbishly break theirs up by cabin class. It still doesn’t show where the windows are, which is quite important to those who like a window seat.
Where Are The Most Accurate Seat Maps?
You’re probably thinking I’m going to direct you to perennial favourite, SeatGuru. In fact, I’m not, because I’ve never really thought much of that website at all. It’s far too generic and it’s a bit old fashioned looking these days.
Instead, I’m going to tell you to take a crack at aeroLOPA. They have fabulously designed seating plans for 17 airlines at the time of writing. This includes large network carriers like American Airlines, Qatar Airways and Cathay Pacific plus low fare airlines like Ryanair and easyJet.
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- Part of the upper deck of a British Airways Airbus A380.
Everything is shown, from the actual design and angle of the seats in business class, to the positioning of the galleys. In the above image, you can even see the A380 upper deck storage cabinets located beside the window seats represented. Everything is there.
All plans also show the windows and their relative position to the seat. Don’t want to crane your neck? You can tell which seats not to choose. Want to avoid the window seat with no window? It’s very easy to tell where that is.
Overall Thoughts
These are the most accurate seat maps I’ve ever come across online. Apart from the six airlines mentioned above, you will also find seating plans for Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air France, Alaska Airlines, Finnair, Iberia, Japan Airlines, JetBlue, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Vueling. You can check them all out at the aeroLOPA website.
While some airlines are more complete than others, the site continues to grow and is becoming an important resource. I’ve used it countless times in the past few months to inform me when choosing seats on various oneworld alliance flights I have coming up. I absolutely love it, as it shows everything I want to see and is precise.
Are these the most accurate seat maps you’ve seen or have you ever come across better? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Alexander Schimmeck via Unsplash.
Excellent, thanks for sharing. Seatguru once seemed fairly accurate but IMHO has gotten unreliable over the years.
Agreed, it really hasn’t been kept up to date. Nature of the beast, I suppose! Thanks for the comment, appreciate it.
Thanks Trent for your kind review of AeroLopa. As the content creator, it is massively appreciated. I do understand the comments about AeroLopa not ranking individual seats and I receive similar requests via the site’s feedback service but what I try to do is present the cabin layout in readable way that allows the reader to rapidly distill the information for him/herself so they can draw their own assessment based on the options available, so you won’t find any editorial or opinion of which seats are best because I respect that there is a raft of individual preferences at play,… Read more »
Hi Greg! Thanks for the tip regarding the KLM VR experience on their aircraft. That’s a really great thing to see and I can see how that will be the future. Makes a lot of sense to do something like that. Appreciate all the work you’re doing on AeroLopa – it truly is an excellent resource. Cheers!
I don’t know if this is any better…some of the graphics maybe larger, but there is no indication if the seat is any good, or if there are misaligned windows, or if there is floor space for carry on. Seat Guru mentioned the good, bad and “iffy” seats. aeroLOPA just shows where the seats are so to speak and has really no other comment on the seats aside from some brief info at the top of the page. No doubt it is better than most of the airlines own seat maps but aero LOPA needs quite a bit more info… Read more »
Well, the window positions are along the cabin walls – you can see all the cut outs for them and where windows are missing. As the plans are to scale, it is up to the user to determine the floor space and so on. You can see it on the JAL 787 seat map on aeroLOPA – there is plenty of floor space ahead of row 17 in Premium Economy, showing these bulkhead seats have far more space than the others – just one example. I find not having the “good, bad and iffy” seats marked is perfect, as most… Read more »
So glad to see this – I’m flying LHR to MLE on BA in the new year, and the SeatGuru seat maps still show the old business class (non-suite) on all BA 777’s which is now several months out of date. It also reassures me for a trip to JFK that it’s all suites too.
Happy to hear you found this useful! It’s a great site. And yes, SeatGuru is getting more and more out of date, so it was time to move on. Have a good trip!