A father sparked a fierce debate on airplane etiquette after allegedly duping a fellow flyer during a seat switch gone south, as detailed in a TikTok video with thousands of views.
“I witnessed the most insane plane behavior on the way here,” TikTok user Alex Bennett said in the video while detailing the “crazy incident,” which occurred on an unspecified flight.
She recalled how the unidentified father had walked up and asked a passenger sitting in the aisle seat behind Bennett if he could swap seats so he could sit with his two children — a contentious issue in the airways of today.
“He’s like: ‘Hey man, my kids have [the] middle and window [seats] and I’ve got this aisle across,” the fly-witness recounted. “‘Do you mind swapping me aisle to aisle?’”
However, when the potential switchee — who was “bigger and older,” per the clip — inquired if the dad indeed had an aisle seat, he suspiciously hesitated before declaring, “‘Yeah, aisle.”
Convinced, the passenger agreed to trade places, after which it quickly became apparent that something was awry.
[A] girl walks up about ten seconds later to the guy that swapped and says ‘Hey I’m the aisle seat here,'” Bennet explained. “And he’s like: ‘Oh, I traded with that guy. He said he was the aisle seat.'”
At that point, the alleged seat cheat was on his phone, refusing to look up, per Bennett, who believed that he downgraded the samaritan on purpose like a shifty merchant hawking shoddy goods.
“The dad had the middle seat, and I think he knew it,” described the TikTokker.
Despite the alleged deception, the duped flyer — who “could not have been nicer,” per Bennett — wordlessly got up from his seat again to move to the middle seat.
Bennett summed up the incident like this: “I totally understand a dad wanting to sit with his kids, no question. But I think you gotta tell the guy, ‘I’m middle. I need a solid here because I need to sit with my kids.’ But you can’t say you’re the aisle and then the girl’s addressing it.”
Needless to say, passengers were quick to criticize the dad for cheating in the game of mile-high musical chairs.
“If you ask to swap seats you have to be offering an equivalent or better seat,” said one outraged commenter.
“Of course he knew it,” said another.
A third declared that if said incident happened to them, the “dad would have been back on his middle seat!”
Others said the debacle was irrefutable proof of why you should never agree to switch seats in the sky.
“A plane is the only place you won’t catch me being a people pleaser. My seat is my seat,” said one stalwart commenter.
“I pay to choose my seat. I’m not trading,” declared another.
Seat switching has been a divisive issue of late. In February, a female traveler was commended online after refusing to swap with a dad so he could sit with his wife and young daughter.
Many commenters argued that if the father wanted to sit with his family so badly, he should’ve booked them all seats together instead of trying to trade places with someone who likely paid more for their seat.