Poor Southwest Airlines can’t seem to please passengers of any size this year.
First, Kevin Smith started a one-hefty-dude Twitter campaign against the bargain airline after being humiliated and asked to leave the plane in front of all the other passengers. Now an anonymous woman has gone huffing to the Sacramento Bee because she was also booted from a Southwest flight- although this time, it was because the woman (who was flying on standby) was made to accommodate a passenger who arrived late and purchased only one seat, but required two.
The incident occurred on a Southwest flight from Vegas to Sacramento, and the woman says that it wasn’t just being bumped that rubbed her the wrong way, but the way Southwest handled it:
“It didn’t seem right that I should have to leave to accommodate someone who had only paid for one seat,” she tells us. (She has asked to remain anonymous for fear some may regard her as insensitive.)
She’s even more miffed because she says Southwest personnel berated her when she questioned the decision to boot her from the plane.
Southwest says that ideally, the incident would have been handled differently, but the late-arriving passenger’s age (she was only 14) was a concern in the decision to eject the unidentified woman:
“We know this was awkward and we should have handled it better,” she says, adding that the airline intends to apologize to the local woman.
McInnis says normal policy is to ask for volunteers when a flight is overbooked for any reason.
In this instance, she says, airline personnel may have been influenced to choose a faster course of action to reduce embarrassment for the late-arriving passenger.
What do you think? Should the thin woman have been ejected initially because she was on standby, or should the chubby teen have been told to wait for the next plane, presumably with her family?
[via Consumerist, Image ]
