Newsstand - British Airways: Men, lone children sit apart

British Airways has apologized to a businessman who was asked to change seats to conform with the airline's long-standing policy of not seating men next to unaccompanied children on its flights.

"It is our policy that we don't seat unaccompanied minors next to adult male passengers because it's something our clients have requested for young people traveling on their own," a British Airways spokesman said on Friday.


Article on CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2001/TRAVEL/NEWS/03/16/britain.plane.reut/index.html)

This policy of BA sounds quite silly. No reason adult men and adult women have to be treated differently.

See
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum94/HTML/002746.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

This is bacause of a recent case where a male passenger molested an unaccompanied minor during a flight. If BA need to have a policy they should consider not accepting unaccompanied minors (because essentially BA is admitting they are unable to look after them appropriately in flight).

This policy has not really been thought through and will lead to legal headaches eventually.

I don't want to sit near children but I would refuse to move on these silly grounds. Let them move the child.

And also it means that women are nearly always going to be put near children - if I were a female FF I would be seriously peeved.

A silly little policy - lets hope they don't actually pay a salary to people for these half baked ideas.


[This message has been edited by Decentlegroom please (edited 03-17-2001).]