Southwest has a nice amount of legroom. I’m only 5’1 but have been on other airlines were there wasn’t even enough legroom for me! I also always pay for early bird seating so I am assured an aisle seat. Not for the extra legroom but because I don’t like making people get up all the time so I can go to the lav.
And we also don’t know that the stand by passenger had a ticket and needed a change. What we do know is that there was a family who was already on board and seated with 2 infants and 4 tickets - at least that is the way it is being reported. One ticket had another child’s name on it who took an earlier flight. If there was a “change” to be made my vote would be for it to be substituting the infant on the brother’s ticket. Seems more reasonable than throwing 4 people off a flight for the sake of one stand by passenger.
I am anxious to see how Delta resolves this one as there appears to be an equal number of opinions on each side. So far they have apologized for the way it was handled and are “reaching out to come to a resolution.” They apparently have also confirmed the flight was not overbooked, but they were trying to accommodate stand by passengers. Really?
Standby = has a ticket and wants a change. There is no way to fly standby without a ticket.
“What we do know is that there was a family who was already on board and seated with 2 infants and 4 tickets - at least that is the way it is being reported.”
No. There was a family with 2 infants and 3 tickets and 1 no show pax.
The way it is resolved will have little to do with whether or not the family was in the right or not. PR trumps any consideration of what actually happened/what policy is. And rightly so as it is plastered everywhere and the airline personnel didn’t handle it well at all and told inaccurate info. That alone should result in the airline bending over backwards to make the family happy.
The father should have approached Delta reservations and asked politely if he could get the baby fly on older son’s ticket for a fee. Instead, it looks like he decided that the rules did not apply to him… If there were empty seats on the flight, why didn’t he buy a ticket for the baby instead of sending the older kid on an earlier flight? Something does not compute here…
And you can’t even step foot through security without a ticket. I’m not sure what people think “standby” is.
Guessing it was fully booked with passengers waiting on stand by.
Here’s Delta’s statement to Business Insider this afternoon:
Schear is quoted earlier as saying he does not want a refund just an apology.
Ha, sure that’s what he wants! That’s why he had his wife film it all and released it to the media, right? Think he wants his 15 minutes of fame and some money.
He was dead wrong, but the airlines just want any bad publicity to go away. If they try to explain the details, the press will only spin in to make them look bad.
Here’s what I think the crew should have done. Told him that lap baby needed to be seated in a lap and they needed to check the car seat. That since they didn’t purchase a ticket for THAT child, he was not entitled to a seat. That it did not matter what the last crew allowed with open seats, and that since his other son was on an earlier flight, his seat was open and available to the next person on the standby list. If this was unacceptable to them, they were welcome to move to a later flight and purchase a ticket for the lap baby.
They should have been calm, firm, polite and succinct.
Had they done this, there would have been no decent video footage to play the victim with, against the evil airline.
“Guessing it was fully booked with passengers waiting on stand by.”
A frequent flier here. Standby pax are usually not booked on the flight they are trying to fly standby on until a small window prior to departure because until then someone may pay top $$ for some of those open seats. Only when the check in closes, standby pax get their seats. The airline would have gladly sold Mr. 15 min of fame a last minute ticket for the baby.
Right, I was responding to your question as to why he did not simply buy the baby a ticket – there were none – the flight was fully booked but Delta claims not “overbooked.” He was thinking he had a ticket for the baby anyway - Mason’s ticket.
His only misstep was not re-booking the ticket under the infants name. IMO that misstep in no way justified what happened to the family.
@BunsenBurner I must have missed the report that the family was given a refund for the four seats they didn’t use, 3 three for the ticketed passengers being kicked off the flight and the one for the flight that the teen didn’t use. Interesting that were other passengers waiting to take their places. If the original passengers weren’t given refunds, it looks to me the it was the airline that benefitted by getting paid double for those four seats.
Apparently, they only decided today to refund them.
Another wrinkle is that 2 lap babies are not allowed in a 3 person row because only 4 oxygen masks will come down in an emergency. This implies that the 1 year old was not a lap baby or the agent would’t have insisted on there being another lap baby (unless they were wrong about that, like they were about using a car seat overall).
“His only misstep was not re-booking the ticket under the infants name.”
Guess why Mr. 15 Min of Fame did not do this? It would have cost him additional $$. He gambled and lost. Not defending the yelling and the escalation of the situation, but he should have been politely and very, very firmly told to get that car seat out of the seat and play by the rules as everyone else.
If that’s what he thought, then he was completely wrong. If Mason had been moved to an earlier flight via a same day flight change or standby for an earlier flight, then he was scamming and pretending that he thought the kid still held the seat.
Please believe me when I tell you that you cannot rebook a ticket under someone else’s name. Please believe this. I’m not making it up. Tickets are not transferrable. You really cannot call and say, “Hey, you know that ticket I booked under my older son’s name? I want to change it to my younger son’s name.” Really. You cannot do that. Try it sometime, call the airline and ask. Is there anyone on here that still thinks that you can do that? He would of had to buy a completely new ticket for his toddler, probably for a much higher fare, at that point.
Now one thing that might have worked on a full flight (but no guarantee), would be to call Delta and make sure they cancelled the older son’s ticket since he wasn’t going to be there. And then ask them to immediately try to book the now open seat for the toddler. I have had success with doing that with full fare tickets before. I trip trade with my husband often, and the flights fill up, but I have a seat. I call up my corporate travel office and have them cancel my ticket, then one seat opens up, and they immediately book my husband.
I would assume that the second lap baby was supposed to sit on his lap. Notice that he was sitting in the row across from his family, with two people who looked like they couldn’t wait for him to leave. I don’t blame him for not wanting to have a baby in his lap for a long flight, but if you don’t, you pay for the ticket like HImom did.
@Bunsen I do not think the additional $ to re-book the ticket was his concern. He owns his own company and from reports appears to have resources. The child could have travelled for free if on his lap, he was looking for convenience and comfort not saving a few dollars. I honestly didn’t think he was looking for 15 minutes of fame either – he seemed pretty reasonable throughout the whole conflict.
And why was he allowed to board the plane with 2 car seats ? They are usually checked so they must have known he was putting the two kids in car seats when he boarded with them.
I don’t know that they had two car seats, I didn’t see that. Perhaps they had only booked two seats and both of the children were supposed to be lap babies. Not sure.
As far as being allowed to board with car seats, people are allowed to bring them on if they purchased a seat for their child. It is the safe thing to do. I don’t know that flight attendants question everyone at the entry door…did you purchase a ticket for that child? Maybe they should. Car seats are checked when you have a lap baby, but often used when the person has purchased a seat for the child.
Just because the guy HAD resources doesn’t mean he was above trying to get the free seat he didn’t pay for to put the car seat in.
When the have folks board, they really don’t stop everyone boarding with strollers and car seats. I suspect that would further delay the boarding process. They might have ASSUMED he had paid seats he was putting the car seats on and not asked him when he was boarding.
There are folks who gate check equipment–strollers, car seats, booster seats and leave them near the door of the aircraft for stowing in the cargo hold.
There was a picture of the two children in one of the UK articles that picked up the story. Don’t think the US press will publish the pics of the children. They were both in car seats sitting next to each other.
And both were adorable --could have walked out of a magazine!