A plane passenger was called “incredibly rude” after refusing to move seats for a woman who was desperate to get away from a crying baby.
According to a viral Reddit thread posted this week, the anonymous 34-year-old man was traveling with his wife, 36, from Dublin to Washington, D.C., and were initially assigned a window and a middle seats in economy class.
However, when no one showed up to claim the aisle aisle seat in the same row, the man moved over for more space.
For the first 4.5 hours of the flight, the man claimed “nothing eventful happene.”
Then, a random woman across the aisle approached the couple alongside her friend from the back of the plane. According to the disgruntled Redditor, the woman “announces that her friend would now be taking the middle seat [in between the couple] to get away from a crying baby.”
“She did not ask — she told us this was happening,” he wrote.
The man called over the flight attendant for assistance, who informed both parties that the woman who wanted to move seats needed to take an available aisle spot, “but could not disrupt anyone’s seating arrangements.”
“The woman then starts b—-ing about how I was assigned the middle but then moved to the aisle before takeoff, so I shouldn’t even have that aisle seat,” he continued.
After disappearing to talk to the flight attendant for a few minutes alone, the woman from across the aisle returns to her seat, calls the man a “f—ing a–hole” and informs him that “her friend would not be sitting there – not because she was not allowed to, but because I was so incredibly rude.”
“The only thing I did this entire time was ask to talk to the flight attendant. I did not say anything else to this woman, though I would have liked to,” he continued, asking readers to weigh on whether he was rude for “not volunteering the middle seat mid-flight.”
Debate ensued in the comments on Reddit, with users divided over whether he really was “an a–hole” for refusing to give up the empty seat in his row. While some people dubbed him “entitled,” others said the combative passenger was in the wrong for not politely asking.
Nicole Campoy Jackson, a travel expert, writer and advisor for Fora Travel, told People that asking the flight attendant for help “was the right move.”
“I am always in the camp of getting a flight attendant involved for sticky in-flight situations,” she said.
“Tensions run high when we’re traveling plus they would know, for example, if there was another aisle seat or another solution to this problem. They have more context than we, the passengers, do.”
While Jackson said the man isn’t “entitled to the unoccupied aisle next to him,” since his assigned seat was in the middle,” “the other passenger isn’t entitled to move because of an inconvenience at her seat.”
“Unlike moving to accommodate someone while you’re still on the ground, when you’re more than halfway through the flight and then asked to move? That is disruptive,” Jackson continued. “I understand why he would have been resistant to the idea.”
Like many of the Reddit commenters, Jackson believes a polite inquiry and reasoning would have resulted in a different ending for both parties involved.
“The best way to approach this situation would have been to walk over to the man and explain, ‘I’ve been having a difficult flight because of the baby next to me. I know this aisle seat was open before we took off, would it be okay for me to sit here for the rest of the flight?’” she said.
At the end of the day, “switching seats does always boil down to flexibility, understanding, and kindness of our fellow passengers,” she added.
“That starts with the ask, by the way,” she said. “It also, of course, boils down to what’s possible within the rules of the airline, the safety of where everyone needs to be at a given time, and what’s been paid for.”
