A young woman boarding a plane ahead of a nine-hour flight wasn't happy to see a little girl had already taken her booked and paid for seat by the window. The child's father was in the middle seat, so she explained the situation to him, expecting he'd simply ask her to move.
Unfortunately, he didn't see things in quite the same way, arguing that his daughter was 'just a child', and suggesting the 22-year-old passenger take the aisle seat instead.
Feeling 'perplexed', she initially did so but wasn't happy at all about how the situation had gone down. Even before boarding the plane, she'd been feeling emotional about saying goodbye to her family ahead of the journey, and had been 'crying on and off the entire day'.
She'd been looking forward to having a window seat after the upset of leaving her family and travelling far away all on her own and didn't think the little girl should have been allowed to just take it.
After telling her family what had happened, her dad called her and told her to take back her seat 'because he paid for it and it wasn’t a free seat'.
Taking to Reddit, where she goes by the username u/Sm782_, the divided passenger recalled: "I then told the girl's father this and he asked her to move. She started crying and I felt terrible but my dad told me to hold my ground.
"The girl moved and is sitting in the middle, I’m in my seat and I’m also sitting back so she can see out the window. Her dad has made one or two snide remarks about me wanting my seat so I just wanted to know, am I the a**hole for insisting on sitting in my seat?"
One fellow Reddit user advised: "You bought a seat to be able to use it, and the father in this situation knew that the seat he put his child in wasn’t theirs to use.
"If the father wanted their child to have a window seat, they should have selected one. People choose their seats of preference for all sorts of different reasons, and they shouldn’t have to deal with someone just assuming that they can sit there."
Another commented: "It's your seat. It's paid for. Never feel bad about this. You seem kind. No harm in sharing the view. But do you think for a second that kid's parent would let you sit there if the roles were reversed? Absolutely not."
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