Man praised after refusing to switch seats with elderly couple on long-haul flight

A man has been commended for refusing to give up his seat on a plane after an elderly couple hopped in and refused to move.

In recent weeks, there’s been plenty of debate around switching seats on planes - with one flier claiming he was approached by a 10-year-old asking him to give up his place in first class (worth a try, eh?), and a woman saying she’d never swap even if it meant a mother and her child couldn’t sit together.

A fellow traveller took his tale to Reddit where he explained that as he was 6’3 and was flying long-haul from LA in the US to New Zealand, he spent an additional $60 to upgrade to economy plus.

However, when he and his partner boarded the plane they noticed their seats had been commandeered by another couple.

He wrote: "[We] find our seats and there is this older couple sitting there (mid 70s). I ask them if they got confused with their seat numbers.

"They hadn't."

Well, mistakes happen, don’t they? Surely it was just a case of letting them know they were in the wrong place, right? Nope.

Despite showing the couple his ticket and seat number and pointing to his name - which was displayed on a small screen above the seats - they refused.

Pexels/cottonbro studio

"They then ask me to just sit in their seats which were 10 rows back," the man wrote, adding that there was 'no leg room' in the proposed new seats.

He then relayed the conversation: "Me: you want me to sit in your seats?

"OP (old people): Yes, that would be nice, thank you.

"Me: I paid extra for these seats and would like to sit in them. Please move to your seats.

"OP: Oh it's not that bad there's plenty of leg room.

"Me: Yeah there's plenty of leg room in my seats because I paid for it. I'll help move your bag if you need."

At this point, a flight attendant approached and the elderly couple had the nerve to say: "This man wants us to move seats!" to which the man calmly pointed out that these were his seats.

Pexels/ Daniel Frese

After checking his tickets, the flight attendant told the elderly couple that they would need to move and let the bloke have the seats he had paid for.

The man said that he got ‘stink eye’ from some of his fellow passengers, but his fellow Reddit users were largely in agreement with him.

One said: “Seriously, what kind of person decides to take someone else's seat on a plane? I understand if there's an empty seat once you've taken off, but this kind of thing takes a special kind of entitlement.”

Another wrote: “Anybody who expects to get a free upgrade on your dime can go f**k themselves, as far as I'm concerned.”

While a third added: “Honestly it wouldn’t matter if you were 4’0 - they were your seats. These people were ridiculous.”