Business-class plane passenger applauded for refusing to swap seats with couple

Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts

Get Simon Calder’s Travel email

A traveller has revealed their reaction after they were approached by a fellow traveller who attempted to get them to swap their business-class plane seat.

The post comes after a couple refused to give up reserved seats for children.

The passenger who had been seated in business class aboard the recent flight took to Reddit to explain how a woman approached them with the request. “I boarded the aircraft and went to my business class bulkhead window seat. [I was] getting ready to settle in for a long flight. A woman came to the aisle seat and placed her bag on the seat. She looked at me and asked me if I would be willing to trade with her husband so that he and she could sit together,” the Reddit user wrote, while noting they were travelling by themselves.

According to the Reddit user, they asked the fellow passenger where her husband’s current seat was, at which point the woman indicated that he was in row 25, which was in the economy section. Because the woman was trying to secure her husband a spot in a more premium section of the plane without paying for it, the Reddit user said they declined to swap seats.

The business-class passenger explained in their since-deleted Reddit post that the woman was “visibly upset” after not being given the seat and “couldn’t believe” she wouldn’t be allowed to sit next to her husband on the plane.

“I suggested that she trade her seat with whoever was sitting next to her husband so that they could sit together. She snorted and told me she had paid for a first class ticket! I smiled slightly and said that, indeed, I had as well,” the post, which has since been deleted, read.

Since sharing the post, many people have taken to the comments section to defend the passenger for not giving up their seat. “I can’t believe she thought this would work. What a moron,” one comment read about the woman who asked to swap seats.

“Sadly I saw a ‘TikTok Travel Influencer’ market this as a ‘hack,’” another commenter wrote. “I hate everything about TikTok.”

“First-class seats long haul cost thousands. No way am I giving up what I paid for so some entitled arse can take it,” a third commenter agreed with the passenger. “Tears or no tears I’m not moving.”

Another commenter chimed in, writing that they’ve witnessed someone use this technique to get a seat upgrade without paying for it and it worked. “I saw it work once and was so mad on the person’s behalf. It was an older woman, and a young couple asked her, and the girl actually started crying. The older woman gave them her upgraded seat, and the minute she was gone, all the tears stopped,” they wrote. “If you want to sit together, you give someone else your upgrade and take the lesser seats. End of story.”

Some commenters assumed that the woman had never paid for a first-class ticket in the first place, but was only upgraded to a better seat and her husband was not. “Because she didn’t pay for first class, she got upgraded, but her husband didn’t,” the comment read.

Amanda Mancino-Williams took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to share her experience riding a full train from Cheltenham to Nottingham in the United Kingdom. The seats were sectioned into groups of four, with two seats sitting in between a table. She reserved one group of four seats for herself and her children, but arrived to see an elderly couple sitting in two of them. In the resurfaced thread, which was initially shared in 2019, she claimed the couple refused to move because her reserved tickets “don’t matter”.