Methodology
SeatRecon exists because the old seat-map directories asked you to trust a color-coded chart with no way to check it. Here is exactly how ours is built, where it's still an estimate, and what we refuse to do.
Where layouts come from
Every configuration on SeatRecon is stamped with one of three provenance badges. The badge tells you how confident you should be in the exact seat-by-seat layout — not the aircraft, not the airline, the specific arrangement of rows and columns you're looking at.
Published map
The airline (or its manufacturer) has published an actual seat diagram or an interactive map showing every row and column. We traced the layout from that diagram. This is as close to ground truth as public data gets.
Derived layout
No published diagram exists, but the airline (or a reliable fleet reference) publishes hard numbers: cabin seat counts, pitch, column layout. We reconstruct the row-by-row map from those counts. The seat counts are sourced; the exact row a given seat lands on is a careful reconstruction, not a photograph.
Mixed sources
Some cabins on the aircraft trace to a published map; others on the same aircraft are reconstructed from counts — common on widebodies where an airline publishes a glossy business-class diagram but not an economy one. The badge covers the whole configuration; the per-cabin notes tell you which is which.
How seats get rated
Every bookable seat on SeatRecon gets one of five ratings, plus at least one plain-English reason if it isn't a plain standard seat. We don't average a five-star score from anonymous reviews — a rating is a judgment call grounded in the seat's own data: is it an exit row, a bulkhead, a galley neighbor, missing recline, missing a window, extra width from a sidewall curve?
- Great — One of the best seats in its cabin.
- Good — A better-than-average pick.
- Standard — A typical seat for this cabin — no notable upsides or drawbacks.
- Be aware — Bookable, but there are trade-offs worth knowing.
- Avoid — Several drawbacks stack up here — choose another seat if you can.
The rule that matters most: a sourced drawback always caps the tier. A premium exit-row seat with extra legroom might otherwise be great, but if its recline is sourced as fixed or limited, it's rated be aware at best — the legroom doesn't cancel the drawback out. Ratings never get bumped up to make a cabin look better than the underlying data says it is.
Windows
Window seats aren't reliably at a window. Fuselage window openings are fixed to the airframe's structural stations; seat rows are fixed to the cabin's pitch. When an airline changes pitch during a refit, seats drift out of alignment with the windows behind them — a window seat with no window, or a half-window shared awkwardly with the row behind.
We check this with an engineering window-grid model: the true window-station positions for each aircraft variant, cross-referenced against each cabin's actual row pitch and starting position. Where a seat's column lines up with structure instead of glass, we mark it no_window and badge it directly on the map — not buried in a footnote. Each flagged seat carries a confidence level: high when it's confirmed against a precise engineering drawing or verified photo, medium or low when it's inferred from published pitch figures with less certainty about exact placement. We'd rather show you a medium-confidence warning than say nothing.
Freshness
Every configuration carries a last verified date — the last time we re-checked its sources, not just the day the page was generated. Fleet counts carry their own as-of date, since an airline's aircraft count for a given cabin changes independently of the layout itself. When a cabin changes — a source is re-verified, a rating is corrected, a seat count updated — it shows up in that configuration's changelog, dated and described, instead of silently rewriting history.
What we will never do
We will never copy another seat-map site's data. Every measurement, seat count, and layout on SeatRecon traces back to an airline publication, a manufacturer spec, or another independently verifiable source — never to a competitor's chart, however convenient it would be to shortcut the sourcing that way. It's the single rule the rest of this page exists to demonstrate we follow.
We will never publish a number we can't cite. Where we don't have a sourced figure — a pitch, a width, a seat count — and have to estimate one to keep a layout usable, that value is visually badged as estimated, approximate, or a stated minimum, right next to the number, every time it appears.
Retired legacy pages
SeatRecon is the successor to seatlink.com, and it does not carry forward every page the old site had. Where an old seat-map URL covers an aircraft or an airline we haven't rebuilt yet, the page now returns an honest 410 Gone instead of a soft redirect to an unrelated page. A blanket redirect to the homepage looks like content to a visitor but reads as spam to a search engine — and it just isn't true that the page has moved. 410 says plainly: this specific page is gone, and re-sourcing it honestly is future work, not something we've silently abandoned or tried to paper over with a redirect.