I had a long talk with a very nice woman from US Airways customer relations today. Cynthia offered me a Very Nice Apology, and empathized with my situation. She’s a mom too, and appreciates how scary and stressful it can be to have someone try to separate you from your kids. She said that having a toddler fly alone was not something the airline considered acceptable. Great. We’re on the same page.
Here’s what Cynthia told me about US Airways seating policies:
- They are in fact first come first served, with no preference given to parents traveling with young children
- When parents are not assigned seats with their children, they are expected to deal with it by getting on the plane with the unacceptable seating and asking other passengers to swap with them.
- Flight attendants are supposed to help persuade other passengers to swap seats, but are not allowed to require anyone to move.
- Gate agents and customer service personnel are not allowed to change seat assignments; it has to be handled by a flight attendant on the plane.
- If satisfactory seating can’t be worked out, they will accommodate families on a later flight.
- In my case, the gate agents and flight attendants I spoke with probably declined my offer to go out on a later flight because they were confident they could resolve my problem – and they did, in the end, by getting other passengers to swap seats.
“The majority of the time, passengers are able to be seated,” Cynthia said.”We do rely on the cooperation of the other passengers.”
I asked the obvious question: What if they don’t cooperate? Would US Airways really let a two-year-old fly by herself, sandwiched between two strangers on a long flight?
“It’s not a situation that would normally happen because nobody wants to sit next to that child,” Cynthia told me.
Wait a minute! People reserve a seat online, and think that is the seat they will have. But when they get on the plane, they’re confronted with a Bad Choice: give up their cushy aisle/window seat and cram their butt into a center seat for the ride, or spend the next few hours babysitting a distraught toddler. Leaving aside the needs of the child or parent involved, that’s a crappy way to treat your other customers.
“Isn’t the airline just pushing the problem off on other passengers?” I asked.
Cynthia didn’t see it that way. “We would hope everyone would be willing to do a favor for a fellow passenger,” she said. She told me she has a child herself, and has always been able to sit next to her own kid when flying, because someone has always been willing to trade seats with her.
Look, I said. If my kid were 20, and had a habit of peeing in her pants, screaming and flailing for no apparent reason, and biting people near her, she’d be a person with special needs and you would bend over backwards to ensure she was seated with a caregiver on your flight.
“It’s the law,” Cynthia said. “We’re required to.”
Uh…does that mean you wouldn’t accomodate people with special rights/needs on your planes if federal law didn’t mandate that you do so? You guys rock!
I asked Cynthia why US Airways doesn’t use the birthdate information they collect about each passenger to flag children under 12 and ensure that they are seated with their parents. They could a) not let parents buy seats on flights that don’t have sufficient adjacent seating available, and b) automatically seat kids with an adult traveling in their party.
They don’t collect that information to help passengers with seating issues. It’s for security.”It’s not because US Airways is interested in saying ‘this is a family with young children and we’re going to make sure they’re seated together,” she said.
Right. Let’s just move on.
Why couldn’t the supervisor I spoke with in Boston fix this for me before we started our trip?
Well, they can’t just go moving people around willy-nilly. Those other passengers selected the seats they did for a reason, and they have just as much right to get their preferred seating as I do.
Now let’s be clear: my preferred seating is at home in my rocking chair while someone else throws themselves on the grenade of flying alone with my kids to visit their grandfather.
But I see her point. Or I would, except that on that second flight, where we had four center seats and the stewardess was so rude:
- my sister was seated between a couple who were traveling together and immediately asked her to move so that they could sit together.
- My baby was seated between a business traveler and a young teenage girl who had been separated from her mom.
- My daughter was seated beside an older woman who was separated from her family, and a young boy whose mom was seated several rows back.
NONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WANTED THEIR ASSIGNED SEATS. They all moved once I did. What was going on there? No real answer on that one.
Cynthia would like to chalk all of this up to lousy customer service on the part of our flight attendant. I agree with her that if the flight attendant on our second flight had been polite, calm and helpful instead of cold, rude and confusing, this problem might never have escalated. A reassuring professional can go a long way in a stressful situation.
BUT.
I don’t think this was the flight attendant’s fault. Everyone has a bad day at work sometimes. Maybe that flight attendant was the best there ever was 99% of the time and I caught her on an off day. Maybe she’s a jerk who deserves to be reprimanded by her manager, as Cynthia assured me she would be. I don’t know.
I do know that, as commenter Amadea put it so succinctly, systems that rely on everyone behaving optimally are systems that don’t work. The airlines’ seating policy has to work whether or not the flight attendant is having a crappy day. It has to work whether or not I am, as one commenter assumed, “not the easiest person in the world to deal with.”
Even if I wanted to leave my 2-yr-old in row 26 while I kicked back with a paperback up in row 5, I kind of think I shouldn’t be allowed to. Doesn’t the airline have a responsibility, for the safety of all its passengers, to keep young kids with their caregivers?
“We do not have a policy that states this is what we require of all our passengers,” she said.
Might they develop one? Well, she couldn’t promise me they wouldn’t. It’s not in the works now, but apparently some dissatisfied customer has been blogging about this issue and wants to see it changed, so they might look into it.
Good to know.
Then we got to the real subject of her call: my return trip. Seems there are no adjacent seats available on those flights, and she wanted to give me a heads up about it.
Could she fix it for me? Not exactly. She could assign me two window seats and an aisle seat for the first leg of our trip. Aisle seats, Cynthia assured me, are very easy to trade. I am bound to find some single passenger traveling alone who will be happy to swap their aisle seat next to my toddler for my non-toddler-adjacent aisle. Awesome. Then I can sit next to one of the kids. Maybe.
For the longer leg of the trip she had better news: she can sit me and one of my kids together in the very last row of the plane, and she can assign my sister and my other kid to the front of the plane. I’m sure my sister won’t mind babysitting my bored child for seven hours on an airplane while she also manages her own lap baby.
The caveat there: the seats at the front of the plane are reserved for persons with disabilities. If someone with special needs requests that seat, my sister and/or my kid can be moved elsewhere, and there’s no guarantee they will be moved together. It’s up the discretion of the flight attendant.
I accepted this band-aid solution because by that point in the conversation she’d made it clear that this is the best they are doing for anybody. I don’t want to be given Special Treatment because I have a bigger soapbox than the other unhappy mommies on the plane. I want them to fix their dumb policy.
In the meantime, dear passengers on US Airways flying from Tucson to Phoenix to Boston next Tuesday, I apologize in advance. I will be asking some of you to swap seats with me. I’m counting on your understanding and cooperation, because US Airways is.
Don’t like it? Take it up with them at customer.relations@usairways.com
[I want to stress that Cynthia was actually extremely nice, personable, polite and gracious throughout our conversation. She wasn't able to offer much in the way of a satisfactory explanation or assurance that this kind of thing won't happen in the future. Most of this post is focused on that, and I just want to be clear that it is Not Her Fault. Like a good actress in a bad movie, she made the best of terrible material.]
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