“Are You Kidding Me?”: Man Refuses To Give Up Business Class Seat Over Entitled Woman’s Demands

An airline passenger has turned to the subreddit 'Entitled People' to express his amazement over what happened on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver that he was on.

While the man, who goes on the platform by the nickname Canada11235813, was getting ready in his business class 'pod,' a woman approached him and asked if he could switch seats so that she and her husband could travel together.

Without giving it much thought, the man agreed; however, he then learned that he had to downgrade to economy.

We got in touch with the Redditor who made this post and he agreed to tell us more about the whole ordeal. "I don't think she thought [her offer] was a fair trade; I think she thought she could get away with it, playing the poor innocent 'Oh, I don't understand!' card with an older, kinder-looking gentleman," Canada11235813 told Bored Panda about the confrontation with the woman.

"Who knows what her angle of attack would've been if I were younger or a female, or whatever. I get the impression she knew what she was doing was a steep ask, but by playing it the way she did, maybe she'd get what she wanted. The way she worded it [and] the way the guy showed up quickly looked like a solid set-up."

The man said he has been asked to and asked himself to swap seats many times, and these requests are often reasonable. For example, one time, he approached another business class passenger because he needed a power outlet and his own wasn't working: "The person didn't mind, and swapped which was very helpful to me," the Redditor recalled. "Another time, I was in an aisle next to a guy whose wife was across the aisle. Would I mind changing? Of course not."

So "if the husband's seat had been anywhere in the business cabin, I'd have been happy to trade with him," the author of the post highlighted. "It would've been a better seat if window, or the same if center-column. I'd just gotten to my seat; would've been zero effort on my part to swap, and why not be a nice guy? In fact, I even offered to move anywhere in the business cabin to help her out. Of course, nobody else was going to swap seats with 18B, but feel free to find me any seat in business and I'll take it."

"I posted this because of how unusual it was, but as per the comments, it turns out, that's not something unusual at all," the Redditor added. "Flights are full of people all the time making these sorts of demands. It's weird and selfish and entitled, but I guess people don't care."

Canada11235813 even remembered another strange thing that happened to him on another flight while the man was traveling with his wife and kids many years ago. "We'd specifically booked the bulkhead row with three seats; more room for us, and the baby would be in my wife's arms the whole trip, etc."

"We get to the seats and all three are occupied by a group of old women, who are obviously traveling together. The one at the window is pretending to sleep, and the one in the middle seat is busy organizing her stuff. I start talking to the lady in the aisle who asks me if possible to take their seats which are all a little further back, because they accidentally sat here and now they're all settled in before they realized these aren't their seats. I said, we have the baby and asked them where were their seats — they were three middle seats, rows apart ... But here's the kicker, as I was looking at their boarding passes and realizing all this, the old lady said to her friend next to her, in Spanish (and in which I'm perfectly fluent) 'Don't worry, this will work. This idiot wouldn't be such a big asshole as to kick out of their seats three elderly women.'

The Redditor said he then switched to Spanish, and "they were horrified and mumbling and angry, but got up and moved."

"Switching seats on a plane can sometimes be a tricky situation," Carla Bevins, who teaches business management communication at Carnegie Mellon University, told USA Today.

She thinks there are some instances where you absolutely may not switch seats. And the first examples she mentioned were when you are in a different service class, sitting in an exit row, or when the fasten seat belts sign is illuminated.

You can try thinking of it as going to a dinner party and someone has a card with your name on it on the table. And instead of sitting in the place you were assigned, you toss the card and plop yourself down wherever you want. Impolite.

Rosalinda Oropeza Randall, an etiquette expert, agrees that you don't have to play along.

"If someone asks you to switch seats, you are not obligated to do so or even consider it," she told the same publisher. "You have the right to decline – politely, of course."

Her pro tip for when the other passenger wants to know why you won't move is to remember that you don't have to explain yourself. "You may say something like, 'I prefer to stay where I am,'" she said.

Airlines could possibly end all the seat-switching if they allowed their passengers to choose their seats without hitting them up for extra money.

"I guess if people were all-around reasonable, you wouldn't need [airlines to interfere], as per my example and many of the comments below it, there are a lot of unreasonable people out there," Canada11235813 said. "So you need rules, and the simplest one would indeed be this blanket rule: no seat swapping, end of story."