Comparing the seat selection sites
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UPDATE: One of the sites mentioned in this post, SeatScorecard.com, has since been folded into Seatguru.com, following a series of lawsuits. See the second item in this post for the update.
For some time now, Seatguru.com has been one of my favorite travel-related sites. It provides invaluable advice on which seats to select, if you know which aircraft your airline is operating on your particular flights.
Seatguru is the biggest site for seat selection advice, but it now has competition.
Two other sites provide advice for a range of airlines. Seatexpert.com is a long-standing competitor, and SeatScorecard.com is the latest entrant, opening for business today.
I still prefer SeatGuru’s overall design, with its mouse-over information boxes and generally elegant layout. SeatExpert comes in second, though they really need to add more textual annotations to their maps. I don’t like the browse-feel of SeatScorecard, but it has a lot of potential. Adding information about specific seats, and not just ratings of average, below average, etc., would help.
The benefit of the latter two sites is their coverage: They provide annotated seatmaps for airlines that Seatguru doesn’t cover. However, a lot of gaps remain, both in terms of which airlines are covered, and which planes within airlines’ fleets. SeatScorecard, for example, list a number of airlines that they don’t really cover yet. (Air Mauritius seatmaps, anyone?)
The biggest challenge to using these sites is figuring out exactly which particular type of plane you’re actually traveling on. Is your Lufthansa 747-400 in a 16/64/310 seating configuration, or a 16/99/234 ?? You have to compare the seatmap available to you online (at the airline website during booking) to the SeatGuru/Expert/Scorecard maps, to see which one matches your actual flight. Or, call the airline and ask them.
In any case, informed seat selection is one of the easiest (and cheapest!) ways to improve the travel experience. Having more information on the web to help you make informed decisions is a great thing.
tags: travel | air travel | airlines | Seatguru | Seatexpert | Seatscorecard
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February 20th, 2007 at 12:45 pm |
[…] The guru defeats the scorecard The field of websites devoted to choosing the best airline seats just got smaller, as two controversial seat selection websites are now defunct. It appears that SeatGuru won its lawsuit against the people behind LoveMySeat and SeatScorecard. The suit, filed last year, argued that the newer sites stole SeatGuru’s copyrighted content and represented it as their own. Looks like crime doesn’t pay: LoveMySeat.com and its duplicate site SeatScorecard.com now both auto-forward to SeatGuru.com, while the SeatScorecard domain is dead. (For what it’s worth, I reviewed the different seat selection sites nearly a year ago, before any of the legal fracas had started.) […]