NEED TO KNOW
- A mom flying business class with her 9-month-old faced backlash from a nearby passenger who told her babies “don’t belong” there
- After the baby cried for two minutes, the passenger complained to the flight attendants and demanded that the mom be moved to economy
- Now, she’s wondering if she’s wrong for how she responded to the woman’s request
A woman turned to the Reddit community for support after an uncomfortable encounter during a long-haul flight left her questioning whether she had done something wrong.
The traveler shared that she was flying from New York City to Zurich with her 9-month-old baby and decided to use her points to book a business class seat so they could both rest on the red-eye flight.
“I recently flew from NYC to Zurich with my nine month old,” she wrote. “It was a red eye, so I figured I had some points to burn and I booked a business class lay flat so both of us would be able to get some sleep.” She explained that after boarding and getting settled, her baby was calm and “just looking around” when another passenger arrived to take the seat beside her.
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According to the post, the woman immediately overheard her seatmate’s displeasure. “A woman comes to take the seat next to me and I hear her say pretty loudly, ‘Are you kidding me,’ ” the traveler recalled. At first, she didn’t think much of it and focused on her baby as the plane took off.
During the first few hours of the flight, things went smoothly. The baby fell asleep for three hours, giving both passengers a peaceful stretch of quiet. But when the baby woke up hungry, things took a turn. “At that point, baby woke up and was hungry, so [she] cried,” the mother explained. “I immediately sat her up and went to make her a bottle, she was crying for a total of I dunno, two minutes?”
That short moment of fussing seemed to be too much for her seatmate. “This woman next to me, who had been sleeping, flies up, proceeds to give me the finger, and stomps over to the flight attendant deck,” she wrote. The passenger reportedly complained to the crew, saying the mother “needed to be ‘put in economy.’ ”
When she returned to her seat, the woman made her feelings clear. “She tells me that babies don’t belong in business class and if I can’t ‘control my infant’ I shouldn’t be there,” the post continued.
The mother, tired and frustrated, said she stood her ground. “I told her I was doing my best and that she can, with all due respect, f— off,” she wrote. “If she didn’t want the roulette of who she sat next to on a commercial flight she could fly her a– private.”
After that heated exchange, the two didn’t speak again. The mother said her seatmate “put in her headphones and didn’t speak to me the rest of the flight.” Still, the encounter lingered in her mind long after they landed. She later shared that when she told her mother-in-law about the situation, she was surprised by her reaction.
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“My MIL said she agrees that babies shouldn’t be in business class,” she wrote. “That it’s an unspoken rule that if you’re flying with a child, you should fly economy.” The poster disagreed, saying, “Why should I be in economy if I don’t have to be just because I have a baby? That seems insane to me.”
Many Reddit users quickly came to her defense, insisting she had done nothing wrong. One commenter wrote, “You cannot dictate who is allowed in what section. If they have a ticket they can sit there.”
Another added, “People are entitled to choose to not have children, but they are not entitled to a child-free world.”
