A man has been praised for refusing to give up their seat on a 10-hour flight so that a family could sit together. Despite being criticized by his own inlaws.
However, in this case, I’m totally on the side of the passenger.
In his now-viral post on Reddit, the unnamed plane passenger explained that he and his wife were boarding a 10-hour flight from Europe to Asia when a mother asked whether he would mind switching seats with her husband, who was sitting in the second row, a request that he quickly denied.
“My wife and I were travelling on a 10 hour flight from Europe to Asia last week. We booked our tickets well in advance and also managed to book the specific seats we wanted – two seats in the first row in the middle column of seats – it was a Boeing 787 with the seat configuration being 3 columns with 3 seats each. We paid for these seats as it was going to be a long journey and wanted the extra leg space.”
“When we boarded, there was woman holding a baby seated in the middle seat. We had booked the 2 aisles on the off chance that the middle seat may be empty but with full intention for me to switch to the middle seat if the passenger wished to sit in one of the aisles and not between us. This woman, before I even had a chance to put my bag in the overhead compartment, asked me “Can I be really cheeky and ask you to switch seats with my husband?”
He added that “My wife stayed quiet while I politely but firmly told her that unfortunately as his seat is in a second row, I wouldn’t be moving there as I had specifically paid for the seat with extra legroom.”
The mom was so angry she even called over a member of the cabin crew in hopes of solving the seat debacle, however, the man still refused to switch seats.
“A steward came and requested me to switch with the husband, and I had to tell him the same thing, making things quite awkward. The woman then threw daggers at me for some time. Thankfully the steward came back and told me that there were two vacant seats in one of the other first rows and offered to move us.”
The crew member was luckily able to dissolve the issue by locating two other seats in the front row the couple could move to.
“We ended up moving there but could hear this lady animatedly make comments about us to her husband from behind for some time after that.”
Although her inlaws sided with the mother, folks on Reddit backed the man’s decision. Users came to the man’s defense since he planned ahead and paid extra for his seats.
“When I recounted this incident to my in-laws they said that I should have just moved as she had a baby with her and that turned into a different conversation about baby expectations. My wife agrees with me that her poor planning is not our problem and that we should have stayed out if there were no other first-row seats.”
After all, it was not the man’s fault that the mother did not plan ahead to sit with her family on the flight from Europe to Asia.
