25 November 2023 , 10:13
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If you reserve a seat on a plane, there's usually a reason for it - and one woman has been praised for making part of a family move out of her seat as she'd booked the coveted window spot.
Tammy Nelson, the CEO of global jewellery brand CONQUERing, chose not to swap seats when people were already sat in her place on a Delta Airlines flight from Cincinnati, Ohio to San Jose, California.
The business boss was asked by another woman whether she'd switch seats with her to ensure she could sit next to her children - but Tammy then realised that the woman was already sitting in her seat, which irked her.
She told Newsweek: "I double-checked my boarding pass thinking I may have had the wrong row. When I confirmed I was looking at the correct seat, I thought she must have just mistakenly sat in the wrong seat. So I said, 'I'm sorry but it seems you're in my seat', thinking she would realise it and move." She says the woman then asked: "Oh, you want to sit here?"
Tammy said that she was pretty "surprised" by the question the woman asked her, but she just told her that the seat she was in was the seat that she had selected.
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The woman then explained that she was with her two kids who were sitting in the seats next to her window seat, and that she thought swapping would be no problem. However, she herself had a middle seat, which Tammy was not keen on taking instead of the coveted window spot she'd booked.
"I get motion sickness during take-off and landing if I can't see out the window. I also don't get a lot of sleep. I often try to get a little sleep on planes which is easiest with a window seat", she explained in a TikTok video. "On that particular day, I only had 90 minutes of sleep the night before. And I was headed into a high-pressure work week where I would be presenting to 500 people and really needed to be at my very best so getting a little sleep on that flight was extra-important."
Tammy said the mother was "super annoyed" at the swap rejection, although she did eventually move back to her middle seat. The CEO's refusal to be pressured into swapping seats was met with a warm reaction online, with many arguing the family should've reserved seats if they wanted to sit together.
"People should book seats together if they want to sit together", one user wrote. Another added: "The amount of families who aren't paying to select their seats together is mindblowing! You were 100 percent right to not give up your seat."
Tammy claimed that said "people are fed up with people feeling entitled" when it comes to seat reservations. She added: "Clearly the woman just expected that I would make a change to meet her needs, not considering what she had done (or not done) that put her in that situation. She just expected me to flex my plans to suit her needs. There seems to be a growing trend of this entitlement in society and I think people are just sick of it."