Plane Passenger Sits in Wrong Seat, Then Too-Polite Passengers Cause Domino Effect of Boarding Chaos

• A plane passenger intentionally sat in the wrong spot on a fully booked plane, a fellow flyer claims on Reddit

• This single traveler allegedly caused a domino effect, with more and more travelers in the wrong seats until boarding was nearly complete

• Fellow Reddit users condemned the woman's behavior and lamented aired other annoying flight experiences in the comments

• PEOPLE spoke to a travel expert about the correct way to handle seat swapping on a plane

One passenger's disregard for their seat assignment set off a domino effect of swapping chaos on a recent flight.

According to a fellow flyer, the woman ignored what her ticket said and — in a highly unusual move — opted to sit seven rows further back from her assigned seat. The seat itself may have been a draw, however. She was supposed to be in 30B, a middle seat, but decided to sit in the window seat 37F, the witness recounted in a post on Reddit's r/delta forum.

The person who actually belonged in 37F chose not to confront the woman in their seat, instead giving up their assigned seat to search for another open one. This happened many times, the author of the post wrote, until a number of people were in the wrong seats on the fully booked flight.

Related: Flight Attendants Reveal the Best Time to Ask for a Flight Upgrade

"So the literal last guy on the plane has a window seat and only one middle is left," the post's author wrote.

It got to a point at which the flight attendants had to get involved, they noted. Once the crew clocked the conundrum, they traced the flyers' boarding passes from wrong seat to wrong seat until they found the instigator.

When the original seat swapper was discovered, she pretended to not know she was in the wrong seat, according to the poster.

The story sparked outrage from flyers with similar experiences in the comments.

"These people know what they're doing," one comment read, and urged others to call out inconsiderate passengers.

"I saw this happen where a wife and husband switched seats with a guy to sit together (both middle seats, so shouldn't have been an issue," but they were all in the wrong seats to begin with," another user wrote in the comments. "Caused a huge delay on an already delayed flight."

Related: A Career Flight Attendant on the Wildest Bad Behavior She's Seen In-Flight: Urination, Strip Teases & More

Some commended the flight attendants for putting in the effort to sort out the wrong seats, because other flight attendants, in their experience, let the behavior slide.

On a less busy flight, one person recounted a similar incident in which another passenger's bad manners worked out to their benefit.

The user recalled when they got to their seat they found another person in their spot with their legs stretched out across the rest of the row. "The [flight attendant] asked where I was sitting, I pointed. There was a brief moment of silence, and then she walked me up to an empty [Comfort+] window seat," the user recalled. "It was the weirdest experience ever, she didn't even engage with the lady."

PEOPLE previously spoke to travel expert, writer and advisor Nicole Campoy Jackson of Fora Travel to weigh in on the subject of seat swapping.

Jackson says reaching out to the flight attendant for guidance is always the right move. “I am always in the camp of getting a flight attendant involved for sticky in-flight situations,” she explains. “Tensions run high when we're traveling plus they would know, for example, if there was another seat or another solution to this problem. They have more context than we, the passengers, do.”

“Switching seats does always boil down to flexibility, understanding, and kindness of our fellow passengers,” Jackson continues. “That starts with the ask, by the way. It also, of course, boils down to what's possible within the rules of the airline, the safety of where everyone needs to be at a given time, and what's been paid for.” 

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