You step onto the plane, find your seat, become a heavy lifter for a second to pop your luggage on the shelf above your head, and finally make yourself comfortable in the seat that was assigned to you—a routine many travelers are familiar with.
Unfortunately, many travelers are also familiar with someone aggravating approaching them after they’ve made themselves comfortable, ready to fight them for *insert reason here*. For this redditor, it was a woman claiming that he had stolen her seat—when in fact, he didn’t—disturbing the peace.
Scroll down to find the full story below, where you will also find Bored Panda’s interview with the OP himself, who was kind enough to answer a few of our questions.
Arguing over plane seats has become quite a common occurrence
Image credits: BLACKDAY (not the actual image)
This woman accused a fellow passenger of stealing her seat when it was in fact double-booked
Image credits: Pew Nguyen (not the actual image)
Image credits: LexB777
The OP said it takes more than making obnoxious assumptions to get under his skin
Someone coming to pick a fight over a plane seat is usually frustrating enough as it is. But when they cause chaos over something that wasn’t even your doing—and express their discontent the way the woman in the redditor’s story did—it takes patience of steel not to start yelling back at them.
Luckily for the entitled woman, the person she chose to let her frustrations out on did have patience of steel. “I like to live with the assumption that most people are doing the best they can at any given time. Unfortunately, her best that day was making obnoxious assumptions. At the same time, it takes more than that to get under my skin,” he told Bored Panda in a recent interview.
“I could certainly find fault with her, but there are always going to be entitled people with little understanding. I just happened to lose the ‘deal with a jerk’ lottery that day.”
The redditor shared that he tried to explain the mixup to her at least twice, but she wasn't listening to anything he had to say. “I had shown her my boarding pass, so if she had wanted to, she could have quickly seen that I wasn't trying to steal her seat,” he said. “She seemed annoyed that I'd even try to tell her that I wasn't trying to steal her seat, so she pretty quickly called the flight attendant over.”
The OP told Bored Panda that after the flight attendant eventually asked the woman to change seats and told him to move back to where he was, the previously yelling passenger got very quiet. “No more comments directed toward me or about me,” he said. “I didn't know what she might have had going on that day, and I didn't care enough to make a snide comment toward her.”
Having to change flights because of overbookings might not be as uncommon as you think
Unfortunately, misunderstandings over something that wasn’t the passengers fault, overbooking, for example, are not that uncommon. According to GetGoing, roughly 0.09% of all air travel passengers have to be rebooked due to overbooking. While it might not seem like a high percentage, it results in quite a significant number of travelers having to change flights. (GetGoing pointed out that British Airways has once revealed overselling about 500,000 seats in a single year, consequently forcing 24,000 passengers to be rebooked on other flights.)
If you’re wondering why airlines overbook flights, the answer is pretty simple—to mitigate the impact of no-shows. Having more people ready for takeoff that can be fitted on the plane allows airlines to remain profitable, as no-shows and last-minute cancellations are arguably inevitable.
Some airlines are more likely to overbook their flights than others
Despite causing some inconvenience, the practice of overbooking flights is completely legal, and also—according to some—not that complicated. “While overbooking may sound like a risky practice to an ordinary person who may not have a deep understanding of the sector, it doesn't cause too many issues,” an aviation industry specialist, Alex Macheras, told Euronews. “Airlines are not simply overbooking flights by unrealistic numbers. They are booking on very specific proven data for that exact flight.”
The practice is based on airlines calculating the number of passengers that are likely not to turn up to a flight based on certain data, and adjusting the number of tickets they sell for said flight accordingly.
Even though no airline is immune to no-shows, some are more likely to bump passengers than others. Travel Weekly found that out of the main airlines operating in the US, the large majority of involuntary denied boardings were made by just three carriers: American, Southwest and Frontier; in the first half of 2022, they accounted for 91% of the 14,805 bumpings made.
It’s not clear what airline was operating the flight the OP was on, but it wasn’t one with a no-overbooking policy, consequently leading to an argument between the two passengers. And, based on fellow redditors’ comments, they weren’t the only ones who found themselves in such a situation while traveling.
Some netizens had questions, which the OP answered providing more details
Fellow netizens shared their thoughts in the comments
Some people have seemingly gone through similar situations themselves
