We’re happy to let you know that tonight we’ve released yet another new ExpertFlyer feature - SeatGuru integration with ExpertFlyer.com Seat Maps. We haven’t officially announced it yet, however we wanted to allow the FT community to try it out first and see what you think.

We’re really excited about this because the integration isn’t just a link that takes you to a page on SeatGuru.com. For applicable flights, you’ll see the actual SeatGuru ratings icons and information overlaid directly on top the Seat Map results. To our knowledge, the only other website that does this is Expedia (which owns SeatGuru parent company TripAdvisor).

We've done a lot of development to try to get as many seat map searches as possible to match and show the appropriate SeatGuru data, however it’s an inherently complicated process and won’t work in every situation. The SeatGuru layouts were designed to be a representation of what the plane looks like in real life, not the GDS representation of the plane. As such, there will be times where there isn’t a match or the system can’t differentiate between similar choices that you or I may be able to figure out with an educated guess. We've come up with a set of rules that try to be smart about the matching process without leading to false matches and wrong rating data.

Some situations where the SeatGuru data may not be displayed:

• When there is ambiguity about which equipment type a flight is with no differentiating factors (seats, exit rows, etc) to help make a decision.
• When there is no exact seat layout match and no equipment code match of any kind.
• Codeshare flights (Operating airline information isn’t returned with seat map data from the GDS, just the marketing airline)
• Flights that have a variable “moving curtain” between cabins may not work. We may not be able to identify the aircraft if we don't know which rows are in which cabin and there is ambiguity about the equipment used.
• Multi cabin searches may have some cabins with SeatGuru data and some without. This is because we do matches on a cabin by cabin basis. This allows us to process a request in parallel so a search with 4 cabins doesn’t take any longer then a search with a single cabin.
• Airlines/aircraft that SeatGuru doesn't have ratings for yet.
• The SeatGuru data isn’t available on the mobile version of ExpertFlyer. We are looking to link to the mobile version of SeatGuru.com in the future.

To help the process of finding a match, when a Seat Map is requested from a flight displayed from Flight Availability or Award & Upgrade results, we may also use the equipment type and operating airline code (for codeshares) from the FA/AU results. Many times, the equipment code listed in the flight schedule and the equipment code returned to us in the seat map request are different.

We ask that any bug reports be emailed to us directly at [email protected] so we can handle them properly. If you are reporting what you think might be a bug because there was no match or a mismatch to SeatGuru data, please first check SeatGuru.com to find the seat map that matches the seating configuration ExpertFlyer shows and include the link to that seat map in your email.

Thanks as always for your support. We hope you enjoy the latest addition to ExpertFlyer.

-EFV