FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - AeroLOPA - Making sense of airline seat maps
Old Sep 11, 2023 | 2:21 pm
  #17  
Prospero
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Originally Posted by HadesNL
The one feature that SeatGuru has had, yet to appear on AeroLOPA
, is which version of a particular aircraft is being used for a specific route on a specific day -
- a key piece of information in making an informed advance seat selection.
It's a fair comment and I have received many requests for this very thing and have been collaborating closely with copilottravel.com with a view of implementing this feature. Having invested quite a bit of time to this, the conclusion is we are not sure if it is possible to retrieve the true seat map from Amadeus, since the data the GDS provides is limited to the aircraft IATA code. If airlines could get into the discipline of developing a single LOPA for each aircraft type, by following KLM's example, then everything in my world would run tickety-boo. But the reality is, most airlines operate on the basis of having multiple LOPAs for a multitude of aircraft types.

So in reality what seatguru.com and seatmaps.com appear to be doing is fetching the aircraft code from the GDS, then applying a best guess to match the LOPA with the flight no and date request. The results are far from perfect, as these sites frequently get it wrong.

ExpertFlyer does have a much higher success rate, which leads me to think they developed a clever robotic script which mines the GDS and also scrapes the more granular aircraft cabin data directly from airline websites. I could be wrong though but in any event, this is something EF does do tremendously well. I just don't think AeroLOPA can possibly match it
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