Plane passenger defended for not letting man sit in empty seat next to him

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A plane passenger has sparked a debate about travel etiquette after refusing to allow a fellow passenger to sit in the empty seat next to them.

In a recent Reddit post shared to the popular “Am I The A**hole?” subreddit, the passenger explained that during a three-hour flight, he and his friend had purchased the last seat in their row because it was her first time flying and she has severe social anxiety.

“She was sitting by the window and I sat next to her and this guy came over and sat on the armrest of the empty seat to talk (very loudly) to his relatives who were seated on the other side,” he explained in the Reddit post.

The passenger then got the man’s attention and let him know that the empty seat was “not available” because they had paid for the extra room. According to the post, this led to the man complaining about the situation “loudly” to his relatives and “mocking” him.

“After that, he stood next to us in the aisle during the majority of the flight and kept being loud and very gestural (a member of the staff even told him to keep it down at one point) and leaned really close to me with his a**, possibly as a way to provoke me (I was sitting close to the aisle at that point because my friend was taking a nap and resting her legs in the middle),” the story continued.

The Reddit poster mentioned that he was surprised the flight staff didn’t intervene, but he doesn’t fly often enough to actually know what the standard is. “Aren’t you supposed to remain seated, unless you have a good reason not to?” the plane passenger questioned.

“Even after the flight, he kept going on about it to his relatives and giving me dirty looks, but I just laughed at him because I feel he was making a spectacle of himself,” the post concluded, before asking what commenters thought about the situation.