An Airline Passenger Rejected A Seat Swap For A Family & Redditors Say She Had A Good Reason

There's nothing like a good seat swap story to get people fired up online and it's happening again on a Reddit thread.

In a Reddit post, a 22-year-old airline passenger says she was asked by a family to swap seats during a flight and she detailed how the situation escalated after she refused to move.

In the post shared on the Am I The A**hole subreddit, the young woman says she booked a "bulkhead aisle seat" in economy on an eight-hour flight from Europe to the United States.

She explains that she has a disability that causes her severe chronic pain, and that contributed to her choice of seats.

"This pain significantly worsens when I’m sitting in an upright position, but I knew I could manage the flight with my medication, leg room for slouching, and the ability to stand up and move around whenever I needed to ease the pain."

The woman says a mom and her baby, possibly around two years old, sat in the two seats beside her, while the dad was seated several rows back in a window seat.

As expected, the woman says the mom asked the Redditor to switch seats with her husband so he could help with the baby.

"I politely told her 'no thank you, I’d like to keep my seat,' which was not received well," the Redditor wrote in her post.

"She badgered me for several more minutes, but I stood my ground. I even explained to her what I wrote above about my disability and why I needed the seat, and she said 'what a load of bs.'"

The Redditor then called over a flight attendant who "eventually got the woman to stop." She also clarified that the airline passenger's husband never got involved.

"She still spent the next 8 hours very loudly talking crap about me to the baby and making a show of yelling back to her husband when she needed something," the Redditor wrote.

She continued by sharing that many other passengers who were sitting around them would throw "disgusted stares" at her and she even overheard someone call her a "monster."

"I didn’t think I was the AH [a**hole], but it’s hard to maintain that thought when you have a cabin of people looking at you like you kicked a lost puppy," she wrote and then questioned whether she was wrong for refusing the seat swap.

A lot of people have chimed in on the lengthy post and shared their support for the Redditor.

"I feel terrible for you. I have invisible disabilities too, and I like to book aisle seats. A scenario like this would have wrecked my year," one person commented.

"Having a kid is not an excuse to act like one," another person expressed.

Others spoke out about the mother not trying to sit next to the dad.

"Did she offer to switch seats with the people sitting in the row with the dad? Didn't think so," one person wrote.

Another person shared that it's up to the person being asked to agree to a seat swap or not, even if that person doesn't have chronic pain to deal with.

"There was no excuse for her to badger you, argue with you after you’d said no, or be rude to you afterwards," they continued.

Needless to say, seat swapping on a plane can be a controversial topic for many people, but it looks like the consensus is usually the same: you don't have to swap seats if you don't want to.

This article's cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.