She needed to check her flight privilege.
As if seat swap requests weren’t annoying enough, now it appears that pushy passengers are snatching up airplane seats without permission.
An appalled passenger recounted having their seat occupied by an entitled woman, who then told them they could sit somewhere else, per a post making the rounds on Reddit.
The unnamed flyer, who was on an 8-hour flight to an undisclosed destination, described how they hadn’t paid “extra” for any seat and had decided to sit anywhere they were assigned.
As luck would have it, the flyer scored a window seat — which they were grateful for given the length of the journey.
“I wanted to sleep with the wall support the window seat offers,” recalled the eager Redditor.
However, the passenger’s dreams of a relaxing flight crashed and burned after they boarded the plane and saw that a “lady” was already sitting in their seat.
To make matters worse, the air barbarian appeared none too willing to move.
“She says ‘Oh, I didn’t realize. You can just sit here,’ and points to the middle seat,” described the meek flyer.
Unfortunately, the flyer ended up capitulating to the ludicrous suggestion.
“I have a hard time with confrontation so I just accepted it,” lamented the Redditor, who asked the commentariat what they would’ve done in their shoes.
Fortunately, the sympathetic Redditors had a host of suggestions with one advising, “Just say, ‘I’d rather have my window seat thanks.’ And if that doesn’t work tell a flight attendant.”
“My response is always ‘Oh, no thank you’ and I just stare at them until they move,” said another.
One told the passenger that they should simply tell the culprit, “No, that doesn’t really work for me. I’d like my seat.”
Another suggested the poster could “feign ignorance” to avoid seeming confrontational.
“Look at your boarding ticket, say ‘My seat is 35A,’ look above, and check the seating arrangement,” they wrote. They then advised the passenger to “act confused” and ask them what their ticket says, before calling a flight attendant and “informing” them that there was a “mistake.”
Many thought the woman commandeered the passenger’s seat on purpose given how comfortable she was telling the Redditor to sit in the middle.
One recalled a similar situation on a flight.
“Some guy tried to take my seat and stick me in his middle seat across the aisle so he could sit with his wife and teenager and I said ‘Oh, no thank you. I picked this seat intentionally when I checked in,” they recounted. “He starts throwing a hissy fit, trying to get me to take his middle seat, and the flight attendant swooped in like a freaking goddess, and told him to move.”
The commenter continued, “He goes to the other side, still moaning, and banged his head on the luggage compartment so hard that three rows worth of people audibly gasped. The kicker is that I sat next to the wife and kid, and they didn’t say a single word to each other the entire flight.”
