A woman has recalled how she faced the ire of her fellow plane passengers during a flight from Dubai to the UK after a large family asked her to swap seats with them
Passengers turned on a woman after she refused to swap her seat with a child during an eight-hour flight.
The aircraft was set to embark on a flight from an unknown African country via Dubai, the second leg back to the UK due to take eight hours. Not wanting to bother others by getting up and having booked a special meal due to her health requirements, the woman had booked herself an aisle seat.
“I boarded the plane, found my seat and settled in. A family gets on with three kids (they don’t speak much English) and asks if I could switch seats with one of their kids so they can be together,” she explained on Reddit.
“The father of the family wasn’t sat anywhere near the mother and kids, so it looked to me like they had left their seats to random assignment. I initially said yes, thinking it was just a move across the aisle, but then realised they wanted me to switch to sit in a middle seat and I said no.”
The refusal then prompted another passenger to get up and offer the woman a different seat at the back of the plane, to which she said no – not wanting her meal to be lost during service.
“I said that I had booked my seat and ordered a dietary meal, and there was no way I was moving to a middle seat. He then starts loudly criticising me and saying he hopes I understand that I’m splitting a family up,” she continued.
“This eventually attracts attention from the crew because it’s holding up boarding. They got a passenger on the other end of the row to switch and sit somewhere else so their kids could sit together.
“The other passenger from before then starts loudly saying to his kids and the family ‘Do you understand what happened? She thought her seat was too special so she wouldn’t let you sit together.’
“I told the guy to mind his own business and he responded that he wasn’t talking to me. I was exhausted and sleep deprived by this point and told him to stop talking about me and just can it.
“I didn’t think I was in the wrong here. I organised myself beforehand and booked my seat, and felt it was quite unfair to have a random guy criticising me to half the cabin for not wanting to swap to a middle seat for an eight hour flight.”
The vast majority of people in the comments were in support of the woman, arguing that the family should have booked specific seats if they wanted to ensure that they could be together on the flight.
“If the family wanted to be together they could have paid to do so,” one person wrote.
Another added: “I’m tired of entitled people thinking someone should sacrifice for them. If they wanted to be seated together, they should’ve booked seats together. Not your problem and good on you for standing your ground and not letting them bully you.”
A third wrote: “You had a legit reason not to move with the meal, and they should have booked seats together, not rocked up and expected others to move to suit them. The random guy was obviously virtue signalling, he just saw a moment to prop up his ego and jumped on it.”
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