skinny person booted off plane so fat kid could have 2 seats
Bob Shallit: Petite passenger booted from Southwest flight
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By Bob Shallit
[email protected] The Sacramento Bee
Published: Saturday, Jul. 24, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1B
Last Modified: Saturday, Jul. 24, 2010 - 9:56 am
Southwest Airlines made headlines earlier this year for kicking overweight actor-director Kevin Smith off a flight because he took up more than one seat.
Now we're hearing the airline recently removed a 5-foot-4, 110-pound Sacramento-area woman from a plane so a hefty passenger could have an extra seat.
The incident happened last week on an early-evening Southwest flight from Las Vegas to Sacramento.
The local woman was flying standby, paid full fare for the last available seat, got on board, stowed her bags and sat down – only to be told she would have to deplane immediately.
The reason?
A late-arriving passenger required two seats because of her girth.
The Sacramento woman, a frequent-flying sales rep, was stunned.
"It didn't seem right that I should have to leave to accommodate someone who had only paid for one seat," she tells us. (She has asked to remain anonymous for fear some may regard her as insensitive.)
She's even more miffed because she says Southwest personnel berated her when she questioned the decision to boot her from the plane.
She ended up getting on the next flight.
"It's small potatoes, in the scheme of things," she says. But she believes Southwest should have been more considerate.
Airline spokeswoman Marilee McInnis agrees.
"We know this was awkward and we should have handled it better," she says, adding that the airline intends to apologize to the local woman.
McInnis says normal policy is to ask for volunteers when a flight is overbooked for any reason.
In this instance, she says, airline personnel may have been influenced to choose a faster course of action to reduce embarrassment for the late-arriving passenger.
Why the extra concern? The person requiring two seats was just 14 years old.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/07/24/2911747/petite-flier-booted-off-southwest.html#ixzz0ulm3WGtg
Share
By Bob Shallit
[email protected] The Sacramento Bee
Published: Saturday, Jul. 24, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1B
Last Modified: Saturday, Jul. 24, 2010 - 9:56 am
Southwest Airlines made headlines earlier this year for kicking overweight actor-director Kevin Smith off a flight because he took up more than one seat.
Now we're hearing the airline recently removed a 5-foot-4, 110-pound Sacramento-area woman from a plane so a hefty passenger could have an extra seat.
The incident happened last week on an early-evening Southwest flight from Las Vegas to Sacramento.
The local woman was flying standby, paid full fare for the last available seat, got on board, stowed her bags and sat down – only to be told she would have to deplane immediately.
The reason?
A late-arriving passenger required two seats because of her girth.
The Sacramento woman, a frequent-flying sales rep, was stunned.
"It didn't seem right that I should have to leave to accommodate someone who had only paid for one seat," she tells us. (She has asked to remain anonymous for fear some may regard her as insensitive.)
She's even more miffed because she says Southwest personnel berated her when she questioned the decision to boot her from the plane.
She ended up getting on the next flight.
"It's small potatoes, in the scheme of things," she says. But she believes Southwest should have been more considerate.
Airline spokeswoman Marilee McInnis agrees.
"We know this was awkward and we should have handled it better," she says, adding that the airline intends to apologize to the local woman.
McInnis says normal policy is to ask for volunteers when a flight is overbooked for any reason.
In this instance, she says, airline personnel may have been influenced to choose a faster course of action to reduce embarrassment for the late-arriving passenger.
Why the extra concern? The person requiring two seats was just 14 years old.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/07/24/2911747/petite-flier-booted-off-southwest.html#ixzz0ulm3WGtg
Comments
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Hope the petite one got a couple vouchers out of the incident.
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Well, she was just on last-minute standby, not a ticket booked in advance so... :roll:
Standby is standby, subject to the airline's discretion, period. The rules of a regular booked ticket simply do not apply.
It should be noted that the airline was just making things more comfortable for all regularly-booked passengers here, not just trying to cram in one more ticket on the plane. -
More thoughts on the subject:
Standby, especially as a trick used by frequent fliers like this salesperson, usually results from someone having booked themselves on a later flight and then showing up early, trying to get on an earlier flight at the last minute.
Or also if someone missed their flight and needs to be booked on another flight later that day as a result.
So the person in question here either...
- missed her intended flight (but let's give benefit of the doubt here)
or
- was trying to game the system to get themselves on a more convenient flight than the one they actually booked on
and
- apparently has the gall to pull one of those "do you know who you're dealing with?!?" ego trips instead of just going with the flow of the standby situation they created in the first place. Especially as it was a kid that needed the seat.
Something tells me that this person would have complained and gone to the press no matter what the outcome, including if she had to sit through a 1-hour flight being squashed in by an overweight 14-year-old that should have been required to purchase another seat. -
jeffrey you're failing to see the extreme injustice and inherent evil.
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If she's still waiting to board, that's one thing, but when you're already seated, it's pretty effed up to get pulled out. One of my pet peeves is building a certain, reasonable expectation and then diverting from it mid-course.
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...but feel free to see it as us Asians just banding together.
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WhyFi wrote: If she's still waiting to board, that's one thing, but when you're already seated, it's pretty effed up to get pulled out. One of my pet peeves is building a certain, reasonable expectation and then diverting from it mid-course.
Yeah, that part was huge. (so to speak)
There was no easy solution to this if the overweight late-comer could not, in fact, fit in a single seat.
Complaints would have happened no matter what the airline did. -
Boygabriel wrote: jeffrey you're failing to see the extreme injustice and inherent evil.
Jeffrey, your new signature line has now been found. Do it, Doooo iiiitttttt! -
can I add to it?
"...as identified by Armchair" -
How 'bout that.
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jeffrey,
Showing up early to the airport and getting on standby for an earlier flight is not a "trick" or "gaming the system." It's trying to get on an earlier flight. When I travel for work, I have our agent book flights that will comfortably get me to my meeting on time and have plenty of time to be in crappy traffic in Chicago or in the DFW area, for example. If my meeting goes short (or is cancelled) or there's no traffic, it's really easy to be at the gate at the airport early, especially for shuttle flights like those between Chicago and NYC or Boston and NYC, which are every hour. In these cases, of course I try to get an earlier flight and get home to my family earlier. There is no trick involved. If I get an earlier flight, I fell lucky, not entitled.
The flier in the story didn't seem terribly entitle or indignant, either:
"It's small potatoes, in the scheme of things," she says. But she believes Southwest should have been more considerate.
And now it sounds like they will be. -
Magicube,
How is trying to get oneself onto an alread-booked flight not a trick (commonly used by frequent fliers ) or gaming the system?
The rest of your initial paragraph above describes precisely the scenario my above post did. Lots of people do this, including me.
The key part is that you do not have a regular ticket for that flight, and all the rights that go along with it.
You have a "we'll see what we can do for you" accommodation made for you by the airline, subject to their discretion, period.
It definitely sucks that the standby person got all the way onto the plane and into a seat, but please explain how you feel this had an easy solution of the airline simply being more considerate.
There was no easy solution. They could either opt to inconvenience someone who was not booked on that plane, or inconvenience the late-arriving passenger and another passenger seated in the other adjacent seat...both of which were actually booked on that flight and had more right and valid claim to be there.
In the age of the previous law suit mentioned in the article, two people with regularly booked tickets definitely trump one person there on standby.Magicube wrote: The flier in the story didn't seem terribly entitle or indignant, either
Aside from going to the press with this, you mean? :roll:
This person went to the media.
There would have been an article regardless -- either this one or another about how she was forced to sit next to and have her [one hour] flight utterly ruined by a terribly obese person that should have been required to buy another ticket. -
Jeffrey,
Everything you say is true, except for the "how is trying to get oneself onto an alread-booked flight not a trick (commonly used by frequent fliers ) or gaming the system?"
A trick is something done deceptively--there's an element of fooling someone, right? So if you or I go to the counter and say "hey, my flight's not 'til 5, can you get me on an earlier one?" how is that possibly a trick?
And I can only imagine that she went to the press because she thought the world should know that a person (even if she only has a standby ticket) can get booted from a plane if the person next to her is so frickin' large she has to take two seats, one of which is unpaid. I know I, for one, cannot get enough stories about the morbidly obese. It fascinates me. -
I think you may be getting hung up on the assumption that the noun "trick" (as I have used it above) always means deception.
Other uses for the noun "trick" include short cut, clever idea, helpful technique, or insider's secret.
When someone skilled at something shares their tricks of the trade, for example, they are not sharing ways to deceive people.
Unless it's a magician or thief or banker (both magician and thief, lol) we're talking about, of course.
***edited the above when I came back and realized it sounded kinda lame -
,
i think the easiest solution to this problem would have been to let the extremely overweight 14 year old fly cargo, thereby releasing two seats to the gamers.. -
I wouldn't say "hung up" as much as confused--that and "gaming the system" led me to think of the standby "trick" as something more like booking two one-way flights and building your own round-trip--a "trick" that travel agents know and do that airlines frown upon.
And I don't think the cargo bay is pressurized, Hamilton, and I would be ticked off if I picked up my luggage at baggage claim and it had bits of 14-year-old on it. This is why I strive to only have carry-ons. Just in case they've stashed the "big-boned" underneath. -
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i believe pets are flown in the cargo area , which would be good for the big boned, as it will offer them something to snack on. -
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another thought is, heaven forbid big bone had to do do-do , do they have double seats in the rest rooms.
i know thats a lot of do's but its the best i could do.
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