The most talked about topic this summer among people who fly regularly was family sitting. On social media, more and more cases were shared of families who encountered refusals by other passengers to change seats in order to allow parents and their children to sit in close proximity, and the main trend was support for passengers who refused to give up their seats in favor of parents who did not bother to choose seats close to their children.
Now, one airline is trying to promise to prevent such incidents – but it mostly pulls its hands away from the question of who is right – a passenger who chose a seat in advance or a parent who wants to sit next to their children. We used ChatGPT to get the details.
American low-cost carrier JetBlue announced a new sitting policy this week, which it says ensures that children up to the age of 13 sit with at least one parent (or chaperone). Until now, it offered a similar service for a fee, but now, it promises, all passengers, no matter how low-cost their ticket was and whether they booked the flight months in advance or at the 90th minute, will be able to sit together with their offspring.
Sounds good – but there is a significant catch: the policy rules are that the company will allocate adjacent seats to the escort and a child aged 13 and under whose tickets were booked together by automatically scanning the reservations, and in case the booker did not choose seats himself – but only if adjacent seats are still available on the flight. If not, everything remains as it has always been, and parents will have to beg flight attendants and other passengers to change seats.
The bottom line seems to be that the company is trying not to benefit the parents, but rather to shirk more responsibility for these situations, in which it is discovered at the airport that the escort and the child have been returned separately.
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