'AITA for not giving up my seat to an 'emotional support person?'

"AITA for not giving up my seat to an 'emotional support person?'"

I (24M) travel was travelling internationally for work. I had an 8-hour overnight flight and my company paid for my ticket but I still chose my seat. I got a window seat because I usually take melatonin and sleep through the whole thing. I don’t like needing to wake up for someone to use the restroom and it interferes with my work if I can’t rest properly.

When I boarded, a woman (late 20s? early 30s?) was sitting in my seat. I politely told her she was in the wrong place. She said she knew, but she was an “emotional support person." I would’ve maybe been flexible if she needed to sit next to her child. But she was sitting next to a fully grown man (I assume her partner).

She explained that he gets severe flight anxiety, and she normally sits next to him to help calm him during takeoff and turbulence. She asked if I would switch so she could “stay with her person.” Her seat, for the record, was a middle seat 30 rows back. I had a connection to make after this or I’d miss an important meeting, so I wanted to sit as close to the front as possible.

I said no mostly because I had a meeting right after my flights and needed sleep, and I wasn’t comfortable swapping for a middle seat in the back.

She immediately got upset and said I was being “selfish” and “choosing my own comfort over someone’s mental health.” The man wasn’t responding at all.

A flight attendant came over. I calmly explained the seat difference. The woman went back to economy but cried loudly for a while, telling the people around her that “some people only care about themselves.”

During turbulence mid-flight, I could see he was panicking and I felt awful. But they could’ve booked seats together in the first place. My friends are split. Some say I did nothing wrong but others say it would have been a small sacrifice to prevent someone’s panic attack. AITA?

Here's what people had to say to OP:

EnterTheOcean wrote:

NTA.

Why couldn't he switch and go sit with her in the back?

WonderfulDelivery639 wrote:

NTA. She's not a very good emotional support person if she's crying loudly to everyone about not getting her way. Regardless of the reason, if you NEED seats together, you book and pay for them. Unless I have a better offer I am not moving for anyone if I have selected my seat ahead of time, especially not to downgrade to a middle seat.

KaliTheBlaze wrote:

NTA. And I say this as a disabled person who does sometimes need to have someone to help me during travel. If I can’t book far enough in advance to get 2 seats together, I call the airline and request an accommodation under my country’s applicable disability law (in the U.S., for flying, it’s the Air Carriers Access Act).

They deal with adjusting seating so that there isn’t an incident on the plane and nobody ends up fighting over seats because we all sit in the seats assigned on our tickets.

(Side note: if you’re flying and need to stay near the front of a plane, don’t book bulkhead row seats because those are the seats that are usually designated to be switched out if a disabled person needs to use a wheelchair to board or has mobility issues or has a service dog or miniature horse).

You might get bumped to somewhere else if there’s a disabled person who needs accommodation. That’s required by the ACAA, and the airline has to comply if the disabled person requests accommodation at least 48 hours before the flight.

It sounds like in addition to not planning well enough to book them seats together, she bought a more expensive seat for him and a cheap seat for herself and planned to take over your more desirable seat without paying the price it cost. In which case this was a deliberate calculated risk to take advantage of another passenger to save money, and shame on her for doing that.

Thriillsy wrote:

NTA. This is a pre existing condition that they absolutely could have, and should have, planned accordingly for. Instead, they chose to save money by not choosing the seat and relied on the willingness of strangers to trade seats with them, even when those seats are not equivalent, and that is their problem to deal with. not yours, not the flight attendant, not other passengers. Theirs.

Clearly, he didn't actually need her with him that badly, because if he did, he would have asked someone in her row to trade seats with him so that he could sit near her. My guess is that this was not about his anxiety flying, it was about them wanting to save money by not choosing their seats before the flight.

They used that BS excuse as a way to try and guilt others so that whoever got the worse assigned seat could be, for free, moved to something better.

Leading-Bench7604 wrote:

NTA! If it was that important she could have asked the person in the seat next to her assigned seat if they wanted to move forward and the person she was supporting could have moved back. If it was that important for him to be near her he should have been willing to take the less ideal seat. This seems intentional on her part as well.

Mullein55 wrote:

NTA. Sounds like a scam to me - she gets a free upgrade; you get dumped in economy. They had other options - like book seats together or ask someone from the back to come forward next to you so they could be together.

SwirlyFlurry wrote:

NTA

If you’re going to ask someone to switch seats with you, there are a couple courtesies you need to be aware of:

Offer the other person the better seat. You’re asking a favor of a stranger, the least you can do is give them the better seat while you move to the less-favorable one.

Be ready for the answer to be ‘no.’ The person doesn’t even have to give you a reason - that is their seat, that’s reason enough.

This lady did neither of these things.