‘She started crying and I felt terrible but my dad told me to hold my ground’
A solo traveller has reignited the debate about giving up seats on a plane after she refused to let a child take her window seat.
The 22-year-old woman explained that she reserved a window seat for her nine-hour-long international flight but when she got to her seat she found a young child sitting in it. The child’s dad was in the middle seat.
Writing on Reddit, where she sought advice on whether she was in the wrong, the woman said the child’s father stared at her and said, “she’s a child”, before pointing to the aisle seat, which she took as a suggestion to sit there instead of her pre-booked space.
The girl then burst into tears.
Commenters were widely supportive of the young woman, who was also upset, having just left her family behind.
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“Leaving my family this time has been hard and I’ve been crying on and off the entire day,” the woman wrote, before explaining how the incident unfolded.
“I had a window seat booked for my flight and I was looking forward to it. When I got there, a child was sitting in my seat and her dad in the middle seat. I looked at the dad and pointed at the window seat saying that I think it’s my seat, expecting him to move.
“He looked at me and said, ‘She’s a child’ and pointed at the aisle seat suggesting I take it.”
The woman called her dad who advised her to take her window-seat, as he’d paid for it “and it wasn’t a free seat”.
“I then told the girl’s father this and he asked her to move. She started crying and I felt terrible but my dad told me to hold my ground. The girl moved and is sitting in the middle, ‘I’m in my seat and I’m also sitting back so she can see out the window. Her dad has made one or two snide remarks about me wanting my seat so I just wanted to know, am I the a*****e for insisting on sitting in my seat?’
As has been the case with most recent stories about seat swapping dramas, commenters have backed the woman.
One user wrote: “You bought a seat to be able to use it, and the father in this situation knew that the seat he put his child in wasn’t theirs to use.
|If the father wanted their child to have a window seat, they should have selected one. People choose their seats of preference for all sorts of different reasons and they shouldn’t have to deal with someone just assuming that they can sit there.”
A second person commented to say they had endured a similar experience, writing: “I was a kid but the child who took my seat was even younger. Instead of asking me, the mom just told her daughter (in earshot of me) that I was nice and would let her have the seat. I was too shy to say anything, so I took the aisle seat but was really bothered by it. So I’m glad OP [original poster] stood up for herself and went back and got her seat!”
A third commented mentioned how frequent seat swapping stories were popping up lately, asking: “What is this epidemic of people assuming they can take another person’s assigned seat? The seats can have different prices, and can be selected ahead of time. The father can keep his snide remarks to himself.”
