Ten months without a real seat map tool. That’s how long it’s been since TripAdvisor pulled the plug on SeatGuru on October 31, 2025, and travelers have been stitching together Reddit threads, screenshots from friends, and airline apps that only show you the seat you’re about to book — not the one three rows up with the broken recline. That gap just closed. On September 1, 2026, AeroLOPA launched native iOS and Android apps, and it did it with SeatGuru’s own founder standing next to the announcement.

That founder is Matt Daimler, who built SeatGuru back in 2001 and sold it to TripAdvisor in 2007. He’s now a co-founder at AeroLOPA. In the launch announcement, he didn’t exactly go easy on his old product: “It’s been 25 years since I created SeatGuru, and seat maps haven’t really evolved since then. They are rough approximations, not a true picture of the experience.” Coming from the guy who invented the category, that’s not a marketing quote. That’s an admission.

Quick Verdict

Aspect	Rating
Map Accuracy	★★★★★
Feature Set	★★★★☆
Ease of Use	★★★★☆
Value for Cost	★★★★☆
Platform Coverage	★★★★★

Best for: Anyone who used to check SeatGuru before every flight and has had nowhere to go since October. Skip if: You fly the same two or three routes on the same aircraft every time — the free website already covers you. Price: Free on web. App: 14-day free trial, then $5/month or $29/year. Works offline: Partially — the app caches maps you’ve already opened, but pulling a new one needs a connection. Platforms: iOS, Android, Web

What Actually Happened to SeatGuru

Quick recap for anyone who missed it. SeatGuru launched in 2001, TripAdvisor bought it in 2007, and for a while it was genuinely the standard: color-coded seats, green for good, red for avoid, built from years of crowdsourced traveler reports. Then, sometime around the late 2010s, the updates basically stopped. Airlines retrofitted cabins, retired aircraft, and rolled out new configurations, and SeatGuru’s database didn’t move with them. By the time TripAdvisor quietly shut it down and redirected the URL, most frequent flyers had already stopped trusting it. The shutdown wasn’t a shock. It was a formality.

What it left behind was a real hole. We’ve flagged this gap ourselves — the Southwest assigned seating guide leaned on SeatGuru’s Preferred-seat breakdowns, and the Alaska/Hawaiian unified app review pointed readers toward it specifically because Hawaiian’s widebody seat maps in the new combined app were rendering wrong. Neither of those workarounds exists anymore. Until now, there wasn’t a clean answer for “what do I use instead.”

What Makes AeroLOPA Different

Here’s the part that actually matters, not just the founder swap: AeroLOPA’s maps aren’t crowdsourced. They’re drawn.

AeroLOPA started as a side project by Gregor Milne, an architect who draws every seat map to scale, accurate down to fractions of an inch, based on real aircraft dimensions. That’s a fundamentally different production model than SeatGuru’s, which relied on traveler photos and reports that could be years out of date or just wrong for a specific tail number. An architect’s drawing doesn’t get sloppier the longer nobody checks it. It’s either accurate to the aircraft or it isn’t drawn yet.

How to tell an AeroLOPA map from a SeatGuru-style map:

1. Scale. AeroLOPA renders proportional cabin widths and seat pitch — a 2-4-2 widebody actually looks wider than a 3-3 narrowbody on screen, not just labeled differently.
2. Per-variant detail. Airlines fly the “same” aircraft in multiple internal configurations. AeroLOPA maps each version separately instead of showing one generic layout for, say, every 737-800 an airline owns.
3. Update cadence tied to a single mapmaker’s process, not a pool of traveler submissions that dries up when a site stops mattering to contributors.

What’s in the App

The website was always free and still is — that hasn’t changed. What’s new is what the app adds on top, and it’s more than a mobile wrapper around the same maps.

• Flight number search. Enter a flight number and date, and for flights within 24 hours, AeroLOPA predicts the tail number and shows you the specific aircraft variant flying it — not just “some 787,” but which 787.
• Super Schedule. Pulls up every aircraft type flying a given route and compares them side by side: cabin layout, Wi-Fi speed, even lavatory placement. Useful if you’re picking a flight time partly based on which plane shows up.
• Sunny Side. Shows which side of the aircraft gets sun exposure for your specific route and time of day. Small feature, genuinely useful on a long westbound flight if you want to sleep instead of squinting.
• Push alerts for aircraft swaps. If your airline changes equipment after you’ve booked your seat, the app is supposed to flag it — the failure mode SeatGuru users hit constantly near the end, since it never had this at all.
• Cached offline maps. Once you’ve opened a map, it’s stored on-device. New lookups still need a connection.

None of that changes what airlines let you book. It changes whether you know what you’re booking before you pick a seat number and find out later it’s next to the galley.

Is $29/Year Worth It?

Depends entirely on how often you fly and how much you already know about the aircraft you’re on.

The website is free and shows the same underlying maps. What you’re paying for in the app is convenience: flight-number lookup instead of hunting for the right airline-and-aircraft combination yourself, tail-number prediction, aircraft-swap alerts, and cached offline access. If you fly a handful of times a year on routes you already know, the free website covers you completely — don’t bother with the subscription.

If you fly enough that you’re regularly booking seats on aircraft you’ve never sat in, or if you’ve been burned by an airline swapping equipment after you paid extra for an exit row, $29/year is a small number against that risk. It’s roughly in line with what we’ve said about other narrow-use travel subscriptions on this site — the CLEAR app review makes the same argument at a much higher price point: pay for the thing you’ll actually use often enough to matter, skip it otherwise.

AeroLOPA vs. SeatGuru: What Changed

Factor	Old SeatGuru	AeroLOPA (2026)
Map source	Crowdsourced traveler reports	Architect-drawn, to-scale
Update model	Depended on user submissions; stalled for years	Centralized drawing process
Native app	Discontinued before shutdown	Live on iOS and Android since Sept 1, 2026
Flight-specific tail data	No	Yes, for flights within 24 hours
Cost	Free	Free on web; app is $5/mo or $29/yr after a 14-day trial
Status	Shut down Oct 31, 2025	Active, founder-backed by Daimler

The honest read: AeroLOPA isn’t a clone of SeatGuru with a new coat of paint. It’s what SeatGuru would have needed to become to survive — and it’s currently the only seat-map service with a real native app at all, since SeatGuru’s own app was pulled from both stores before the site itself went dark.

Who Should Download This

Anyone who used to reflexively check SeatGuru before booking. That habit has nowhere to go right now except AeroLOPA. It’s not a partial replacement — it’s the replacement.

Travelers on widebody or long-haul routes with mixed cabin configurations. This is exactly the scenario where crowdsourced maps used to fall apart, and where scaled, per-variant drawings matter most.

Points-and-miles flyers picking seats based on aircraft type. If your ability to sleep on a 14-hour flight hinges on getting a specific seat on a specific variant, the tail-number prediction feature is worth the price on its own.

Who Can Skip the App

Occasional flyers on routes and aircraft they already know. The free website has the same underlying maps. You don’t need push alerts and offline caching for two trips a year.

Anyone who only flies domestic narrowbody routes. Seat map accuracy matters most where cabins get complicated — widebodies with mixed configurations, retrofit variants, premium cabin boundaries that shift by aircraft. A 737 in a 3-3 single-class layout doesn’t have much room for the old SeatGuru-style errors in the first place.

The Bottom Line

SeatGuru’s shutdown left a real gap, and for almost a year, nothing filled it properly. AeroLOPA closes it with a better foundation than the thing it’s replacing: architect-drawn maps instead of crowdsourced guesses, an app that actually exists on both platforms, and the person who built the original category signing off on it as the successor. The free tier still works fine for casual flyers. For anyone who books seats on unfamiliar aircraft regularly, $29 a year is a reasonable price for not finding out mid-flight that your “aisle seat” was actually next to the lavatory.

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Pricing and feature details current as of the September 1, 2026 launch. App features and subscription terms are subject to change — verify current details at AeroLOPA.com before subscribing.