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We’ve debated the ethics of switching seats and the protocol for making requests, but a story about plane seats from England that made a six-year-old boy cry really makes me shake my head.
Acorn refuses to switch seats with boy who was assigned the same window seat
Like many six-year-olds, Ryan Bandli loves to fly and likes to look out the window when he flies. He traveled with his parents from Manchester (MAN) to Budapest (BUD) on Buzz, a Ryanair subsidiary, and his mother had prepaid to reserve a window seat for him.
But upon boarding the plane, the family noticed another woman sitting in the window seat assigned to their son. They compared boarding passes and both were assigned the same seat (not sure how that’s possible, but okay…).
The woman refused to move, insisting that it was her chair and that she had at least sat down first. Ryan started to cry.
His mother told The Mirror:
“Ryan was really upset and anxious and he was crying. He didn’t understand how this could happen. We sat separately and it was really stressful.”
He was assigned an aisle seat next to his father and spent most of the flight crying.
Ryanair blamed the problem on an “isolated IT outage” but left the woman sitting by the window.
“Buzz is sorry for the inconvenience caused to Ms. Bandli and her son and a member of our customer service team will be reaching out to them directly.”
Early reports suggested that the family had paid for a window seat in the emergency exit row (where no one under the age of 15 is allowed to sit), resulting in the seat change. The Bandais insist this was not the case and that a window seat closer to the front of the plane was purchased.
And so, at least for the time being, we assume that this is the case and turn to the female passenger who refused to move.
To her I say: shame on you, asshole. It’s one thing to demand a window seat if you’re assigned an aisle seat. But it’s quite another thing if you’re both assigned the same seat. I don’t blame the woman for causing the problem, but if you see a six-year-old crying at the window on a two-hour flight, for goodness sake, just be a decent person and move…
CONCLUSION
A seating problem at a Ryanair subsidiary resulted in a six-year-old boy losing his window seat. My son who is also six likes ramen and would have a similar reaction. This is how I understand how important a window seat is for a young child. As far as I’m concerned, the woman should have switched seats.
Do you agree or would you also have refused to move chairs for the boy?
If it turns out that this was an emergency exit, Ryanair should have found the family seats elsewhere in the plane.
image: Sz Adri
