A Guy on My Flight Refused To Move Seats for an Elderly Couple
It taught me a lot about courtesy
Travelling is my favourite thing to do.
I spend quite a lot of my life on planes and I’ve learnt an awful lot about travelling etiquette over the years.
I’ve travelled for work, family holidays, solo trips and to commute, so I’ve really got to experience every kind of flight.
But it was on my most recent flight where things really got interesting.
The flight
I had just finished a solo trip to Italy and it was time to fly home.
Due to the early departure time of 6:20am, I had spent the night sleeping at the airport. The time came for boarding to start and everyone joined the queue.
I think it would be pretty safe to say we were all feeling pretty tired.
The flight was going from Milan in Italy to Dublin in Ireland, and was operated by Aer Lingus, Ireland’s national airline.
After a short time, I reached the front of the queue and joined the line to board the plane.
The unfolding event
I eventually made it to the plane and began finding my seat. All I wanted to do was sit down and try to sleep. Quite a few times, because I’m a solo traveller, I had been upgraded to an extra legroom seat, but I wasn’t so fortunate this time. My seat was 15A, a window over the wing, just behind the emergency exit rows.
As a 185cm person, I often look at the people in the emergency exit rows with envy. After all, they do get:
- Extra legroom
- Slightly bigger seats
- More room to move around
- Bigger armrests (at least by the window)
However, unfortunately this time I hadn’t been upgraded and I decided not to pay extra for the seats as it wasn’t too long a flight (only 2.5 hours).
Chaos
As I’m sitting there, I watch as a man who’s likely not much older than me (30, maybe) climb into the row in front.
He’s lucky, he secured the extra legroom seat and got a window too.
But, suddenly, there’s a problem.
I see an elderly couple approach slowly. They don’t really look at the seat numbers which makes me raise an eyebrow, but I assume they’re just regular flyers who know their stuff.
They approach row 14, then stop.
Turning to the man sitting by the window, the couple say,
“Excuse me, we would like to sit here.”
The man looks back at them, a little baffled.
“Sorry?” He replies.
“These seats,” they repeat, “We would like to sit in these seats.”
The man, still looking confused, asked the pair if this is the seat number on their boarding card.
That’s when things really kicked off.
“Look, my wife is disabled and struggles a lot with her mobility. We need these seats because of the extra room.”
The man replied, “I’m sorry, but I paid extra to sit in this seat, so I would like to sit here.”
As I was sitting watching the unfolding events from the row behind, I thought to myself this would be the perfect situation to feature on the ‘Am I The Asshole?’ thread!
The old couple started getting quite aggressive towards the man. The husband began shouting at the innocent man, saying his wife needed the seat and he was being inconsiderate by not letting her have it.
At this stage, the man in front put his earphones in and pretended to sleep – a power move.
The old couple went to get a member of the crew and explained their situation. The crew were less than sympathetic (thankfully!) and told the couple if they didn’t want to sit in their allocated seats, they could get off the plane.
Take off
Finally, the plane was ready to depart and the elderly couple had plonked themselves down in their original seats.
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor man in front of me.
He hadn’t done anything wrong, simply boarded a plane, and he had experienced such an irritating event. But, he did thankfully get to enjoy his extra legroom seat the whole ride home.
Was he the assh*le?
When I got home, I did my research on this kind of situation, and I was pretty surprised with what I found.
I assumed that, like me, people would be on the side of the man, who paid for his seat and refused to move.
This was my reasoning:
- He PAID for his seat, why should he move?
- The elderly couple had the same chance as everybody else to purchase extra legroom seats beforehand if they needed them.
- Being rude and demanding shouldn’t get you anywhere in life.
However, what I found was quite surprising.
Probably about 30–40% of people said the man WAS being an asshole, and he should’ve moved for the couple.
People said that, if the elderly woman really did struggle with her mobility, the courteous thing to do would’ve been to let her sit in the roomier seat.
Of course, there were also a lot of people who agreed with me, but it was interesting to discover that it wasn’t everybody.
So, next time I fly, I’ve prepared myself for what to do in this situation.
What would you do?