Someone on a recent flight says she was yelled at by an angry mom who wanted to switch seats with her without a good reason.
The flight attendant went on Reddit on March 9 to ask other users if she was in the wrong for a strange seat-swapping incident.
As she wrote, the original poster (OP) said that she was on a late cross-country trip to Newark Liberty International Airport and that she was sitting in her assigned seat, which was “right behind the exit row in the aisle.”
The poster says it would make sense to ask for this if the children were young, but the woman’s two kids looked like they were in college and at least “over 18,” she wrote.
“She cut me off when I was saying that I would rather stay in an aisle seat closer to the front because I get claustrophobic,” OP wrote.
The passenger then says that the woman called her a “bad person” for having to sit away from her kids. The woman then gave up and went back to her own middle seat.
The woman went back to the OP’s row after the plane arrived and told her that she knew the OP had a “great flight” because she was sitting next to her “two amazing children.”
Instead, the OP told readers about the kids that “frankly they were obnoxiously loud and did not wear deodorant.”
But things got worse as they got off the plane.
The mom is said to have started swearing at the other rider, which made the OP worry about her safety, she wrote. “When I think about it now, I wish I had involved someone else,” she said.
As the poster writes, she thought about whether she should have just given up her seat because she would have been more willing to switch places with the woman if the kids were younger.
But people who left comments didn’t feel sorry for the angry woman and thought the sign wasn’t wrong. A lot of the comments agreed with the person who wrote, “If the women cared this much, she should have paid extra to have them sit together or booked the flight earlier.”
Redditors all agreed that the woman should have bought tickets for herself and her sons sooner to make sure they could sit together instead of risking being seated next to someone else.
Some people thought the boys might not have wanted to sit with their mom, which was another option.
One person wrote, “It’s very likely that the kids moved their seats when they checked in to get away from her.” “Her grown children were probably glad to be rid of her,” said someone else.
Nicole Campoy Jackson, a travel expert from Fora Travel, has already talked to PEOPLE after an Instagram post about a similar situation in 2023 started a conversation that went viral.
“Passengers should pick out their seats ahead of time as much as possible for this reason,” Campoy Jones said. “When you get on a plane, I don’t think you can expect someone to leave their seat for you.”
The OP wrote that a woman came up to her right away and asked if they could switch places so she could sit next to her two kids.
But Campoy Jones says that if the fight gets worse, it’s the flight attendants and the airline’s job to handle it because it’s “no longer one passenger’s responsibility.”