Last night I flew from Los Angeles to Panama City, Panama on Copa Airlines, a flight I’ve taken probably a dozen times.
While I almost always fly this route in business class (and am, thankfully, flying business class home), the flight was packed and the best I could score was an aisle Economy Comfort seat, which is an economy seat towards the front of the airplane with a bit of extra legroom.
Despite it being a very full flight, the two other people in my row didn’t show up and I had an entire row to myself. I was so excited.
I passed out before takeoff, but there were two men seated diagonally behind me that were talking so loudly that it woke me up, even with my noise cancelling headphones on. So, even though I don’t love putting my feet up on an airline seat, I decided that I would instead try to lie flat, with my feet towards the aisle and my head towards the window.
I finally fell asleep again when, after about 10 minutes, I woke up to a woman sitting on my feet. This was a first for me and when the woman saw me wake up, she told me that she moved rows because she wanted an aisle seat. All I wanted was to sleep, so I ignored that she sat on me and instead told her that I had no problem with her moving to the row if she wanted, but that she would need to take the window seat, as I booked and much prefer the aisle. She said she only wanted an aisle seat and reluctantly went back to her original seat.
To avoid being sat on again, I decided that I would go back to sleeping vertically in the aisle seat — still enjoying the row to myself, though — and asked the flight attendant to ask the loud passengers to quiet down, which mostly worked. Only I was woken up again about 30 minutes later by a different woman who was walking over me to get into the empty window seat in my row.
In both of these scenarios, these women moved into seats that weren’t their assigned seats without asking me — the only person in the row — if I’d be okay with it (if either had asked me if they could move to the window seat, I would have said yes).
With that, I wanted to crowdsource your thoughts here: Do you think it’s okay to switch yourself to an empty open seat without asking the other people in the row if they mind?
2 comments
A thoughtful post and an accordingly tough question. I’d say that it would be okay on a packed flight for a person to move into a window or aisle seat on a 3×3 across where there’s only one person in the three seats. Unlike in your situation the person should approach the current passenger to ask about seat preference rather than sitting on someone. That would presumably leave the middle seat empty so it wouldn’t be so bad for either party. I do think that one person taking three seats on a full plane is doing a disservice to fellow passengers and I’ve been on both sides of this.
If you were looking to continue on your vein of asking though provoking questions, you could bring up whether it’s correct to hold saver award space on redundant bookings at the expense of everyone else.
Thanks and I totally agree with you that it would be a disservice for a person to purposely take up an entire 3-seat row on a full flight. That said, I don’t think a person who has a 3-seat row to themselves has any obligation to volunteer a seat to someone, just that if someone asks they should allow another passenger to join in their more spacious row.
Re: holding saver space availability, my thought is that if you have the points, you found the booking, and you may take the flight, then you’re not ethically in the wrong by booking a seat even if you might not use it. You would, however, be in the wrong if you booked space that you had absolutely no intention of using.