‘Passenger was furious I wouldn’t swap plane seats – but I wanted full row’

A man has sparked a debate after revealing he ‘banned’ a stranger from sitting next to him on a plane because he wanted the extra room for himself.

The 34-year-old explained how he was travelling back from Dublin to Washington DC with his wife, 36, when luck struck. The couple ended up with an entire row to themselves after the passenger assigned to the aisle didn’t show up. He said on Reddit : “We were assigned the middle and window seats in a row. The aisle passenger no-showed so we ended up having the entire row to ourselves (huge win). Before leaving the gate, I moved to the aisle seat and my wife stayed at the window.

“Nothing eventful happened for the first 4.5 hours of the flight. The flight attendants were amazing and even gave us extra drinks for the ‘guy in the middle’.” However, a passenger approached them mid-flight and said her friend would now be taking the middle seat because she ‘needed’ to escape the cries of a baby sitting near her.

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“She did not ask – she told us this was happening. There were about three hours of flight time remaining. I ask the woman whether the flight attendants are on board with this. She said yes, but since these deals are usually brokered by the flight attendant, I called over a flight attendant.

“The flight attendant said the agreement was that they could take an available aisle seat but could not disrupt anyone’s seating arrangements. The woman then starts moaning about how I was assigned the middle but then moved to the aisle before takeoff, so I shouldn’t even have that aisle seat. I had been sitting there for almost 5 hours and we had already distributed our items all over the row.”

Following this, the woman and her friend went off to speak to the flight attendants before returning to him about five minutes later. He added: “The woman across the aisle then comes back to her seat and proceeds to yell at me saying that ‘her friend would not be sitting there – not because she was not allowed to, but because I was so incredibly rude,’ and that I was a ‘f****** a*******’. I kept my eyes on the show I was watching.

“The only thing I did this entire time was ask to talk to the flight attendant. I did not say anything else to this woman, though I would have liked to.” Wanting to know whether he was in the wrong, he asked Reddit users: “Am I the a******* for not volunteering the middle seat mid-flight?”

In response, one user said: “They should have asked politely, but you paid for two seats and had the benefit of three for most of the flight, and you were not actually entitled to hog all three seats while somebody else suffered. It would have been fair to decide which of the three seats you would let her have, but refusing her a seat because her friend was rude was an a****** move, and the flight attendant shouldn’t have let you do that.”

Another user added: “I’m going with the unpopular opinion here. You paid for two seats, not three. You didn’t ask the flight attendant because you wanted to “verify the rules”. You asked because you didn’t want to lose your space and were hoping the flight attendant would not permit her to move. You were assigned a middle seat. So per the flight attendant, the woman could have sat in the aisle seat, once you moved into your actual assigned middle seat. She’s somewhat an a******* as well for her attitude and rude behavior.”

A third user said: “Her rudeness and entitlement means that she sucks, of course. But you suck here, too. You’re entitled to your seat, not your row. This would have been the time to move back to where your assigned seat is.”