Air travel is often a stressful affair, especially when traveling as a family - more expenditure, more luggage to carry around, more potential for chaos.
And it is often the case that when booking flights as a family, there is no guarantee that you will all be seated together. Not even with young children.
But this is not an issue for Daily Mail columnist Jaci Stephens, who revealed last year that she always refuses to switch seats to help families out.
The Mail columnist expressed her exasperation with Irish model Vogue Williams, a mother-of-three, who recently argued with a fellow passenger on a flight from London to Gibraltar for not switching seats so she could have all her family sit together.
"She was flying to London from Gibraltar, for goodness sake. It's a three-hour flight," rants Stephens, "Read a magazine. Order Duty Free. It's not his fault that you're so disorganized you can't read a plane seat map."
The 64-year-old writer continued, highlighting her own specific demands when flying, "I travel a lot. I have very specific seats I always choose (ask Virgin Atlantic; if I can't get 8A, I'll change planes). I like an aisle seat when traveling domestically because I need to use the rest room a lot. I like to be at the front because I don't like crowds and invariably need to disembark quickly. I spend weeks, sometimes months, making sure I have my favorite seat."
Most airlines, once you have booked your tickets, offer you the chance to reserve specific seats. However, a lot of seat reservations cost extra, which can be off putting for people flying with their entire family, as reserving several seats in a specific section can soon add up and prove to be quite costly.
Because of this, some families decide to run the risk of not reserving seats and hoping the airline will simply sit them all together. However, this is often not the case and can lead to issues once everyone is on-board the flight.
In her column, published last August, Welsh writer Stephen detailed several incidents where she has been asked to swap seats with somebody, only to refuse them.
"On one flight awhile back, I was in one of two front row seats, and the woman behind asked if I would swap so she could sit next to her boyfriend. I refused and was met with incredulity (less so from him, who seemed quite glad of the three-hour respite)."
The arguments in these situations tend to flare up when children are involved, as parents don't want to be separated from their kids on a flight (or they actually secretly do so they can have some peace and quiet, but understand that leaving a screaming four-year-old on their own probably isn't best practice for anyone).
Yet New York-based Stephen has also denied families from sitting together, as she detailed in the article.
"I was traveling back to the U.K. from the U.S. on American Airlines and I had selected seat 2A - my first choice. After I had stored my hand luggage and settled down with my iPad to read a book, a man came up and asked me if I would move so that his family - a wife and two kids - could sit in a row.
"The seats are very far apart, so it was hardly as if they'd be on a Disney ride together and, after looking at the seat he was indicating behind me, I saw that it faced backwards, so I explained that I didn't want to face that direction.
"He then asked if they could find me another seat on the plane. I said no. Not only is it my right to refuse, I don't like being near a lot of people in these Covid times. He was furious and started shouting at me, wishing me ill for the future if this were ever to happen to me, and then stormed off to the other side of the plane to try to persuade others to move."
Where do you stand on seat swapping? Is it acceptable to deny families and couples the opportunity to sit together or should people be accomodating? What are your own policies on these sorts of situations?
