How to Get the Best Seats on a Plane

You’ve compared flight schedules and airfares. You’ve booked your itinerary. Now, it's time to pick your seat on the plane. Easy, right? Well, sort of.

While even frequent fliers may think they have their seat selection handled when flying a standard domestic route, the bathroom location on a new aircraft or a misaligned window, for example, could provide an unwelcome surprise upon boarding.

If your flight is overnight or a long-haul, or if you are choosing a seat in an unfamiliar cabin class, you'll want to ensure that you'll be happy with your decision. The color-coded squares, angled rectangles, and other seat map markings featured on your airline’s website may not be the most reliable way to ensure your comfort on your next departure. Here are some better ways to pick the best seat on the plane and arrive comfortably at your destination.

SeatGuru maps and descriptions

SeatGuru is the most popular site for seat selection. Enter your airline, travel date, and flight number, and you'll be presented with a seat map. SeatGuru seat maps are superior to airline maps owing to three features.

First, SeatGuru maps help you make a quick judgment. They use a simple traffic light color code to indicate good seats, bad seats, and cautionary seats.

Second, SeatGuru provides details on each seat's amenities. Hovering over the seat will give you a pop-up with an explanation as to the seat's color. For example, a message on a red seat might read: "missing a window" or "does not recline, and the proximity to the lavatory behind may be bothersome." Descriptions can also include everything from legroom to floor storage to the tray table location—and more.

Messages on a yellow seat may advise that the "seat is missing a window-side armrest." The pop-up will also contain icons to indicate the presence of in-seat power or seat-back entertainment screens.

Third, SeatGuru allows travelers to post photos and comments on their experience.

Bloggers’ trip reports

When you go beyond domestic flights, gathering more details can be especially helpful. Your favorite travel bogger's trip report may contain high-quality photos and all the extra information you could want. If you do a web search for the airline name, departure and destination cities, and the phrase “business class seat,” you'll likely find multiple trip reports to choose from and perhaps even some YouTube videos.

Trip reports can help you pick up on the nuances of planes and carriers you may not be accustomed to. For example, not all window seats are created equal. Some business class seats are technically window seats but can be nearly 2 feet from the window owing to in-seat storage. With this knowledge, you'll confidently know that window seats, say, in rows two and four are preferable to the odd-numbered rows on Iberia's Airbus 330.

Airlines’ fleet rosters

The seat map the airline shows you when it's time to pick your seat online isn't necessarily the best seat selection tool it offers. Some airlines offer more detailed seating information on their fleet pages, which list all the aircraft they fly and their specifications. Here, you can typically find the measurements for seat width, pitch (i.e., legroom), and the inches of seat recline.

You might even find a 360-degree view of the cabin. When viewing United's fleet page, for example, click to view the seat map for a specific plane. On the new page that opens, click the 3D seat view button. A new browser window will open, showing you excellent photos of the plane's interior. You can use your mouse to pan the image around, viewing the cabin from all angles as if you were on board.

Safety first

Comfort and amenities are trumped by only one thing: safety in the event of an emergency. While comfy first-class seats are usually located in the first few rows of a plane, the safest seats may be the middle seats in the back of the plane, according to a TIME magazine analysis based on injury and survivorship data collected from the Federal Aviation Administration’s CSRTG Aircraft Accident Database.

While the safest seat on a plane will depend on the unique circumstances of a given incident, of course, the fact is that flying is relatively safe compared with other modes of major transportation—and it’s getting safer all the time. “The risk of a fatality from commercial air travel was 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018-2022 period,” according to MIT researchers.

Regardless of how you define the best seats on a plane, using a combination of the airlines’ seat maps and various third-party reports and rankings, you can more easily than ever find the best seat for you.