Traveling can be stressful, but a little organization can alleviate this. One passenger was traveling home from Africa via Dubai on an eight-hour flight and paid extra to sit on the aisle to avoid crawling over people. They also pre-ordered a special meal because of their dietary restrictions. This passenger was asked to move seats by a family who did not appear to have planned so well. The single passenger declined.
This is when things took a turn for the worse. Another passenger decided to loudly berate the prepared original poster about their choice. The OP took to Reddit to see if they were wrong for declining to change seats.
The OP got all settled in their seat.
The weary traveler was already on their second flight of the day, and looking forward to getting home. They settled in their seat. “A family gets on with 3 kids (they don't speak much English) and asks if I could switch seats with one of their kids so they can be together, they recalled. “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.”
Another passenger gets involved.
“Another passenger then gets up and says he has a seat in the back that I can move to (no idea how) and I said no,” they explained. “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. This eventually attracts attention from the crew because it's holding up boarding.”
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The crew steps in.
Thankfully, flight attendants are trained for moments such as these. “They got a passenger on the other end of the row to switch and sit somewhere else so their kids could sit together,” they recalled. “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.”
Are they wrong?
This passenger does not believe they did anything wrong but wanted to double-check. “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 8 hour flight,” they explained.
The forum was pleased to give its two cents.
You should not have to give up your seat.
The majority of the forum was on the OP’s side, but there was some nuance to the situation. Most agreed that when you look at the situation in black and white terms, if you pre-paid for your specific seat, you should not have to give it up.
“If the family wanted to be together they could have paid to do so,” argued one commenter.
It's OK to have some empathy as well.
Other commenters on the site reminded the original poster that the family might have planned to seat together but with so many travel delays and cancellations lately been forced to take a different flight.
“Sometimes they do book together but the original flight gets cancelled or they miss a connection and the airline doesn't put them together on the next flight,” wrote one user. "I've ever been split up from my partner by this sort of thing (though sometimes the staff in the airport can fix it if you arrive early enough)."
A new perspective …
The OP can rest easy that they both efficiently planned ahead and stood up for themselves. They were not wrong to keep their seat. It is also nice to get a new perspective that the family might not have been able to plan as well. Perhaps this will broaden their world view and make them a little more understanding in the future.
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