Traveling with children can be an ordeal. They’re impatient, and long flights can prove incredibly challenging. On top of the normal stressful things, the prospect of not being seated next to your children — to not only monitor but also comfort them should anything go wrong — can be irritating at best and frightening at worst.
At that point, you’re up to the mercy of a fellow passenger. When requesting a seat change, there’s no guarantee what the person might say. But one mom got lucky.
This mother of two could not book seats together for her entire family.
Anna Lyn Cook, who has two children, was traveling with them and husband but was not able to book seats together. She tried to ask the gate staff to help her, all to no avail.
When she boarded the plane, she and her husband were sitting in one area and her kids in another, so she decided to ask the person who would be sitting next to her children to switch.
She offered the man in her seat a better option.
She sold the idea by telling him that her seat had a lot more leg room — and of course pointing out that he wouldn’t have to sit next to young children on the flight. It would be a lot of pressure for anyone.
Naturally, the passenger "was so down," as Anna described it.
“The guy, who was sitting in this seat, he was looking at the seat. You could just kind of see in his face, ‘I’m sitting here with all these kids?’" she explained.
Anna called it a win-win.
In the caption for the video, Anna wrote, “I would never ask anyone to switch seats unless I could offer them a better option. If they didn’t want to, I’d happily except that. Also — we ALWAYS pay extra to select our seats if we have the option. But sometimes things happen and it doesn’t work out. This guy was so nice and it was a win/win ."
TikTokers commended Cook for how she handled the seat-switching scenario.
The comments on Cook’s video were mostly people giving her kudos for seat-switching the right way, with thousands of likes and approvals. Apparently, people are against seat swapping unless they’re getting something comparable or better than what they had originally.
“See this is how you trade a seat!!! Offer a better one ,” one user wrote. "I love people with good home training. Life can really be this simple."
It appears people have been making ridiculous seat-switching requests, and folks are tired of it.
