Seat switch request: What would you have done?
A friend who is an infrequent flyer recently traveled from Florida to Colorado for a weekend get-together. The plane was a 757 with three-seat rows in economy. He reserved an aisle seat.
When he took his seat, he noted that two little girls of Asian descent, perhaps 6 and 8, occupied the middle and window seats in his row. Sometime before takeoff, the older girl asked my friend if he would mind switching seats with their mother, who was seated a couple of rows back in a window seat on the other side of the plane.
He turned to the mother and said he'd agree to a switch only if she could engineer a three-way swap that would give him another aisle seat. He did not want to give up sitting on the aisle. There was no response.
Midway through the flight, he discerned that the mother did not have a firm grasp of English and probably had not understood his three-way swap offer. And although he was slightly irritated by the girls' frequent trips to the lavatory, he stayed in his aisle seat for the duration of the 3+-hour journey.
When asked, I told him I would have changed seats with the mother to unite her with her little children, and said I found his behavior to be insensitive at best.
How would other FTers have handled this situation?