Whether you’re on a business trip, visiting family, or going on vacation, there’s pros and cons about flying.

It’s quicker, and sometimes it’s cheaper, and you’re basically forced to switch off for a few hours.

But at the same time, it’s terrible for the planet, you have to navigate the airport and its extortionate food, and you have to be crammed in next to strangers all that time.

A courteous seat neighbor can make things a whole lot better – but as the person in this story found out, meeting the wrong seat neighbors can make the whole ordeal a nightmare.

Read on to find out what happened.

Airplane story! Family tries to trick me into switching to the middle middle

A couple of years ago I was on a fully booked international flight.

The flight was going to be eight hours, and it was one of those big planes with three rows (three seats on each side and four in the middle).

I was in economy sitting alone in the aisle seat of one of the side rows.

Let’s see what happened next.

A couple with their already unhappy toddler walked up, and the wife and kid sat down in the middle row beside me.

The dad looked around distraught, talked to his partner and then asked me if I could switch seats with him so he could sit with his family.

I was reluctant, but asked him what seat he had.

To my surprise he said he had a seat in business class, so of course I said absolutely!

But then, something changed with this plan.

I started to get up and grab my luggage, but once I stood up he was like “wait, my wife actually wanted to go sit up there, can you take her seat instead?”

I said no, I’m not switching to the middle row and being blocked into a middle seat by a screaming toddler… and you said you wanted to sit with your family??

The dad got all defensive and switched up (holding up traffic during this entire interaction) raising his voice.

He started going on about how I said I could switch seats with them, and how it’s not fair to his wife who had planned on taking his seat up in business class.

Read on to find out how this passenger responded.

Not my proudest moment, but I was starting to sass back at him.

I’m pretty sure I asked him something along the lines of if he had any extra of whatever meds he was on, because it had to have been some top notch stuff for him to be acting so crazy in public.

At this point a flight attendant had finally squeezed her way up to us and asked why we weren’t taking our seats.

Before I could say anything this man had the audacity to say that I had offered to take his wife’s seat and now I wasn’t cooperating.

And what happened next surprised everybody.

I called ********, and thankfully the passenger sitting behind me backed me up.

The flight attendant was not in the mood to play.

She asked to see his ticket, told me to grab my luggage and escorted me up to his seat.

Needless to say I had a very nice flight after that.

Sure it’s nice for families to sit together, but this family turned toxic and nearly tricked a passenger into a significantly worse seat.

If this was intentional from the beginning, instead of the behavior of a stressed-out dad, that’s completely unfair.

Lucky for this passenger, they ended up winning on this deal in the end.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit had to say about this.

This person shared a more unfortunate seat swap story.

While others stood up to potential seat-swappers.

Meanwhile, this Redditor saw things from the mom’s point of view.

Some people really are so entitled.

Imagine offering to switch for business class, then rapidly withdrawing that offer and leaving the poor person – who was willing to help accommodate your family – stuck with a worse seat instead.

It’s completely unreasonable.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.