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'Entitled parent' discovers airline moved their toddler's seat just before flight takes off

Another passenger behaving badly story takes a huge twist.

Photo by Steven Thompson on Unsplash

I took a long Amtrak train trip from Atlanta to Baltimore with my 9-year-old daughter this summer.

As far as I could tell, there was no way to reserve specific seats in coach on our particular train ahead of time. But we arrived as early as we could and, to our delight, were treated to a near empty train. We sat together in a two-person row and had a really nice trip up to Baltimore.

On the way back? We boarded at Union Station and the train, having arrived from New York, was already packed. The conductor told me he would try his best to seat us together but couldn't guarantee it. You should have seen the terror in my daughter's eyes.

It would be a 14-hour overnight train ride. Sitting her next to some stranger that whole time? Absolutely not. No way.

They eventually found us seats across an aisle from each other, which kind of worked, but wasn't ideal. Luckily, the guy I was supposed to sit next on the other side flew into a rage that he wouldn't have a row to himself and stormed off to sit elsewhere, freeing up the row for us.

But for a few horrible minutes, I had become "that dad" desperately asking anyone in the area if they'd be willing to move so we could sit together.

I had become the dreaded entitled parent from all the viral travel stories.

Stories of "entitled parents" desperately trying to get other passengers to switch seats go viral all the time. But a recent thread on Reddit shows why we don't always get the full story.

Description from Reddit of airplane seating snafuReddit

User u/takeme2themtns recently shared a nightmare travel story in the r/Delta subreddit:

"In typical Delta fashion, they just switched up our seats and placed my toddler in a row away from us," they wrote. "Booked three seats ... in comfort plus months ago. Now, several hours before the flight we get notifications that our seats have changed. They put wife and me in exit row seats and the toddler in a window seat a row away."

With no way to fix the seating snafu digitally, the OP would have to rely on the Gate Attendant or even Flight Attendant to make a last-minute change — which would force someone else on the plane to move.

"I’m confident the GA (gate attendant) will take care of it," they wrote, "but it’s still so frustrating that we have to worry about it. I know we see posts like this all the time, but that’s because it happens all the time to people. Delta needs to fix this trashy system."

Another user in the comments wrote to share a similar story:

"I had this happen to me. The check-in person said to talk to the gate.

The gate said to talk to the flight attendant.

The flight attendant told me to ask people to trade seats.

I asked people. People said no. Other passengers started berating me for not planning ahead and saying my lack of planning isn’t their responsibility.

I defended myself by saying I reserved seats months ago and Delta moved me at the last minute. Then passengers started yelling at each other about my situation.

The FA had someone move and I got to sit with my daughter."

The user noted that the situation was chaotic and traumatizing.

These stories are far from rare.


woman carrying baby while sitting on gray seat Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

I found another story just like this from a few months ago on the r/United subreddit. The user's family booked seats together only for the system to separate them right before the flight, leaving an 8-year-old to fly seated alone. The flight crew's only solution was to ask other passengers to switch, causing the OP's family to get lots of dirty looks for the duration of the flight.

Having a young child or toddler seated away from you while traveling is just a complete No-Go, for many reasons. But as a dad, leaving a kid of nearly any age to sit alone — even if they're 8 or 10 or 14 — is not acceptable.

It's not just about convenience, it's a huge safety issue. There are plenty of horrifying news stories that support why a parent would do absolutely anything to avoid it.

When we hear these stories, they're almost always framed as the parents being unprepared, lazy, and entitled. But maybe we're missing the point.

boy sitting on plane seat while viewing window Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

A story from January of this year praises a passenger who refused to switch seats with an "entitled dad" as a "hero."

People are fed up with parents asking them to switch out of airline or train seats that they paid good money for. And I don't blame them!

But we need to stop beating each other up and start holding the airlines and other travel companies accountability for putting parents and non-parents into this mess in the first place.

There needs to be a better system for families booking plane and train tickets. When you buy tickets, you have to enter in the ages of the children you're traveling with — so it stands to reason that these mix-ups flat out shouldn't happen!

Families shouldn't have to panic at the gate or on board about this! Other paying passengers shouldn't have to give up their seats!

The good news is that the Department of Transportation has recently gotten involved with a dashboard of which airlines guarantee family seating at no additional cost.

The DOT is looking to even make it illegal to for airlines to charge parents and children fees to sit together. Parents and children under 13 would be required to be seated side by side or immediately adjacent, and if not, they'd get a full refund or free rebooking — it's known as the Families Fly Together Act.

Traveling in 2024 is stressful enough, from seat changes to unruly passengers to high numbers of cancelled flights.

Seating kids and parents together seems like one small problem we should be able to solve.

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Women share the unbelievable ways they were treated on planes for being fat

"The most important thing that fellow passengers can do is just acknowledge the humanity of the people they're traveling with."

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Plane rides can be a dehumanizing experience for many

Before moving to London to pursue a degree in anthropology, Stacy Bias had to decide if it was worth getting on the airplane.

"As a woman over 300 pounds, flying was pretty anxious for me," Bias says. Over the years, Bias came to fear being stared at, subjected to rude comments from seatmates, or asked to purchase an extra seat. The anxiety got so bad that at one point, she stopped flying altogether.

With a little determination and encouragement from her partner, who had recently relocated to the U.K., Bias faced down the fear and got on the plane to London. Soon after, she started a Facebook group to offer discussion, support, and tips to other fat travelers who had encountered similar roadblocks. The group quickly grew to nearly 4,000 members and Bias, in conjunction with a research project for her undergraduate dissertation, presented the group with a survey, encouraging members to share their experiences in the air.

"I had to take the survey down after three days because I was overwhelmed with respondents," Bias says. Like Bias, the overwhelming majority of survey takers reported feeling leered at, harassed, and like an unwelcome intruder in a public space.

Bias interviewed nine of the respondents. The result was the short animated documentary "Flying While Fat," which Bias posted to YouTube in 2016.

"The goal of the animation is to humanize fat people," Bias explains.

"I think fat people are talked about a lot — especially fat passengers are talked about a lot — but rarely spoken with."

Some of Bias' subjects love to fly and to travel, but they express frustration at having to endure "the expression" — the look of disappointment and anxiety that crosses their potential seatmates' faces as they walk down the aisle. Others describe having a "hyperawareness" of their bodies at all times, constantly evaluating how much space they take up. Verbal harassment, threats, even physical abuse are common threads in the interviews.

For one participant, the struggle over fat peoples' access to plane space fundamentally comes down to fairness.

"Everyone is fully aware of how much money they spent on those cubic inches," she poses. Because of the ever-shrinking size of airline seats and aisles, fellow passengers, she hypothesizes, are primed to go to the mat over how much room they believe they deserve.

For smaller people, one person's ability sit comfortably in an airplane seat may seem trivial. But for Bias' subjects, it's anything but.

"It's a topic that people feel strongly about," Bias says. "It really impacts the ability of people to partake of the world, to see family, to travel internationally, to go to funerals, to go to weddings. It's a thing that really impacts peoples' life in a profound way."

policy, standardization, customer, disabled

Animation showing the different shapes and sizes of airline travelers.

Image via YouTube video.

Fat flyers, she contends, frequently feel like excess baggage and a problem to be solved — and that, coupled with hostility from fellow passengers, can make them think twice before purchasing a plane ticket.

Bias believes the solution to the problem starts with standardizing customer size policies across the industry and creating more accessible spaces on aircraft.

Currently, those policies are a patchwork. Some airlines, like Alaska and United, require passengers who can't put both armrests down comfortably to purchase an additional ticket. Others, like Delta, simply "recommend" that customers who can't fit comfortably in a single seat do so.

Airlines "need to prioritize the well-being of passengers over profitability so that people literally can fit into the bathroom if they need to," Bias says.

This lack of concern could pose real health risks for some fat flyers. According to Bias, roughly one-quarter of her subjects reported dehydrating themselves before boarding so they wouldn't have to walk down the aisle or attempt to fit into the restroom.

Fat people, she believes, aren't the only ones who could benefit from an industry-wide policy review.

"It's disabled people, it's people with injuries, it's people with long legs. Everybody is deeply uncomfortable on the plane. It's getting more so."

Bias hopes to publish the results of her study in the coming year.

In the meantime, she hopes the film helps smaller flyers understand the frustration and helplessness their fat counterparts often feel in a space where cruelty can sometimes erupt subtly and without warning.

community, sociology, obesity, health and fitness

Animation of various physical shapes each with a heart.

Image via YouTube video.

For passengers of any size, Bias believes a little empathy and respect go a long way.

"The most important thing that fellow passengers can do is just acknowledge the humanity of the people they're traveling with."

This article originally appeared on 12.07.16

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WestJet flight attendant's funny safety presentation may actually make flying safer

Nobody's zoning out during this safety spiel.

Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

A flight attendant makes the safety demonstration highly entertaining.

Most of us who fly on commercial airlines with any regularity at all have heard the preflight safety presentation so many times we tune it out. Emergency exits forward and back, seat cushions act as flotation devices, put your oxygen mask on first before assisting others, and so on. Once you've heard it a couple of times, you feel like you've got it down.

However, we've seen evidence that most people actually don't have it down. In 2018, a Southwest flight had an emergency midflight and passengers were asked to put on their oxygen masks. Photos from the flight showed that the majority of passengers put them on incorrectly, indicating that people actually do need to be paying attention to the flight crew's standard safety spiel.

Let's face it, though. Even most flight attendants appear to be robotically going through the motions in those presentations, and who can blame them? They have to do the same thing over and over hundreds if not thousands of times.

But occasionally a flight attendant comes along and breathes new life into the routine with some unexpected humor and flair.

Case in point: A WestJet flight attendant whose physical comedy was nearly impossible to ignore. Watch how he makes a standard safety demonstration into a hilarious comedy routine:

According to Narcity, the flight attendant's name is Michael McAdam and videos of his hilarious safety presentations have been circulating since at least 2011.

Here's a longer version of the above video. This is a guy who truly makes the most of his job.

While McAdam's dramatic antics are entertaining, they could actually make passengers on his flights safer if an emergency actually happened. Instead of zoning out while he demonstrated the aircraft's safety features, people were giving him their rapt attention. Who's going to forget his goofy face when he pulls on the straps of the oxygen mask? Humor is a clever way to get people to actually tune in, which may make it easier for people to remember what to do in case of an actual emergency.

Getting passengers to laugh is also a wise way to influence the overall emotional tenor of the flight. Travel can be stressful, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only added to passengers' stress levels. Setting a light, jovial tone at the beginning of a flight and getting everyone's feel-good chemicals flowing with some collective laughter might preemptively fend off conflict between cranky flyers or conflicts with crew members.

Finally, some people are very nervous to fly. Hurtling through the sky at 500 mph with nothing between you and the Earth 30,000 feet below you but few layers of sheet metal and a fairly uncomfortable chair can do that to a person. Having a flight attendant put on a mini comedy show might put them at ease, lessening the likelihood of panic setting in as the crew explains what to do in an emergency.

While we can't expect all flight attendants to be this entertaining, it is a treat when you get a funny one. Thanks, Mr. McAdam for giving us all a good giggle.

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This woman was fat-shamed on a flight. But her story has a happy ending.

Image via Pixabay.

Airlines pack the passengers together.

On May 14, 2018, one of Savannah Phillips' most dreaded flying fears came to life.

"I’m not the biggest person on the airplane, but I’m not the smallest," Phillips explained in a Facebook post. "My worst nightmare is someone being uncomfortable because they have to sit next to me."

Fearful of the harassment and even threats people with bigger bodies can face while flying, Phillips usually tries to buy a seat where she's not sitting next to another passenger.

But on a flight from Oklahoma to Chicago, Phillips was assigned a seat at the gate and wasn't able to sit alone. Unfortunately, the man who ended up next to her embodied the very worst.

"I can't believe this, I'm sitting next to a smelly fatty."

Those were the words the stranger, an older man who claimed to be a comedian, texted someone else — while sitting right next to Phillips on the plane. A setting on the man's phone enlarged the text, according to Phillips, and the screen's brightness was turned all the way up.

It was unmistakably about her.

obesity, decorum, strangers, heroes, airline tickets

​Phillips describes her experience during an interview.

Image pulled from News Channel 5/Youtube.

The nasty comment immediately brought Phillips to tears.

"I don’t even know what the rest of his text said," she wrote in her post. "I turned my head away as fast as I could. I was shocked and it was like confirmation of the negative things I think about myself on a daily basis."

Phillips continued:

"Before I knew it, I could feel hot, salty tears coming down my face. I sat and cried silently, hoping this guy didn’t try to make small talk, because I didn’t trust how I would react and I didn’t want to get kicked off the plane. I was so hurt. The pilot came over head and said there would be a 30-minute delay before he could take off — great. Just more time I would have to sit next to this creep."

Fortunately, that's when things took a turn for the (much, much) better.

Fellow passenger Chase Irwin sitting nearby had spotted the incredibly hurtful text and decided to step in.

He couldn't believe what he was witnessing.

"I actually got really sick to my stomach," Irwin explained to News Channel 5.

new, health, air travel, bullying, community

Irwin describes the uncomfortable situation on the news program.

Image via News Channel 5/Youtube.

Irwin tapped the "comedian" on the shoulder and demanded he change seats with him, according to Phillips. The "comedian" agreed to switch, but then asked why.

Irwin did not hold back. "I said, 'because you're a heartless person,'" Irwin recalled. "I read your text, and the girl next to you crying also read your text. And you should really take into consideration other people's feelings.'"

I am only sharing this story of what happened to me today in hopes that the person who stuck up for me will somehow be...
Posted by Savannah Phillips on Monday, May 14, 2018

Phillips and Irwin got along great, chatting about their families and jobs on the flight to Chicago. The flight attendant, who learned about what happened, kept trying to give Irwin free drinks and said that he was her hero, according to Phillips.

"He wasn’t her hero," Phillips wrote. "He was mine."

Fortunately, Phillips' story had a happy ending. But for passengers with bigger bodies, that's not always the case.

"Flying while fat" can truly be a daunting affair. There's the staring, the rude comments — not to mention navigating a patchwork of guidelines that complicate purchasing a ticket for an increasingly small seat on a plane.

But as Irwin showed, employing some basic empathy for your fellow passengers can go a long way. We should all keep that in mind when we travel.

Watch News Channel 5's segment on Phillips' story below:




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