Mom Shares Her Unpleasant Interaction With A Plane Passenger Who She Asked To Move Seats
Every passenger's nightmare.
@leahova / TikTok Traveling is already stressful enough, and it can prove to be even more difficult upon realizing that another person is sitting in your assigned seat on an airplane.
One mother shared her unpleasant encounter with a fellow passenger who did exactly this while traveling with her family.
In a TikTok video that has been viewed nearly 2 million times, Lea Hova explains her nightmare traveling dilemma on a recent flight she and her family boarded.
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The mom asked the passenger to move seats after he sat in one that she booked.
She acknowledges that stories about mothers who make their fellow passengers change seats on planes so that their families can sit together have recently taken the media by storm, but points out that her own story is not one of those cases.
“We’ve all heard a bunch of these stories on TikTok and I think they’re getting to people’s heads,” Hova says.
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She claims that during a recent flight, she had booked five seats for herself, her husband, and their three children so that they could all sit next to each other.
Hova adds that the plane had three seats on either side of the plane per row, and she had booked five seats in row 20 of the aircraft that were all next tp each other with a remaining window seat that none of her family members would be occupying.
This meant that her husband and two of their children would be sitting in one row, and Hova and another one of their children would have the aisle and middle seats in the row right next to them.
“We’re walking down the aisle and I have one or two kids beside me, so we get to row 20 and I’m like, ‘hey guys, you’re on the right here,” she says.
“I look to my left, and there’s a guy sitting on the aisle.” The aisle seat was a seat that Hova had booked.
She decided to double-check with the passenger to see if there had been a booking mistake. “I’m like, ‘hey, what seat do you have booked? Because maybe they double-booked the seat,” the mother says.
“He’s like, ‘oh, I got 20F,’ and I’m like, ‘oh, okay I think you’re in the wrong seat.” Hova claims that her delivery was polite.
However, the passenger argued with her. “He’s like, ‘I don’t know if that’s true,’ and I was like, ‘no, we’ve got five [seats] in a row, A, B, C, D, and E and you’re on the window,” she says.
The passenger became hostile and refused to move his seat.
His voice escalated at Hova, and he said to her, “if you want me to move so that your family can sit together that’s fine, but I don’t know that I’m in the wrong seat.”
The woman pointed out that she was not asking the man to move seats so that the family could sit together, but that he was sitting in the seat she had booked.
“I was like, ‘do you feel really passionately that you need to be on the aisle like we can talk about it, 'cause I don’t really care that much,” Hova says.
The man repeated that he had no problem moving seats so that the family could sit together but he was not in the wrong seat and still refused to move.
“I’m asking you to sit in the damn seat that you f–king booked,” Hova hilariously recalls.
She eventually grew tired of arguing with the man since it was going nowhere, and her husband stepped in.
When Hova’s husband told the man that he was in the wrong seat, he moved immediately.
“The point is, don’t try to make me look like the disorganized mean lady,” Hova emphasizes. “Don’t make me be a Karen, no thank you. Just sit in the f–king seat you booked.”
She added in her caption that their argument caused the line on the plane aisle behind her to back up.
TikTokers sided with the mother and criticized the man for not sitting in his assigned seat.
“You did the responsible thing and booked in advance,” one user commented. “Next time throw manners out the window if someone disrespects you like that.”
“There's a photo of the seat immediately over the isles indicating what seat is what.. so I probably would have had him look at the diagram and just been a matter of fact…” another user pointed out.
“I think his issue was he needed to hear he was wrong in a man's voice in order to understand,” another user noted of the man’s sexism.
Some people just simply cannot be reasoned with, and this man was one of them.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.