CEO praised for refusing to leave airline seat to let mother sit next to her children

A woman who refused to switch seats with a mother so she could sit next to her children on an airplane was commended online for sticking to her stand.

Tammy Nelson, the CEO of global jewellery brand CONQUERing, shared the incident on TikTok and said she was flying on a Delta Airlines flight from Cincinnati, Ohio to San Jose, California when another woman requested her to switch seats so she could sit next to her two kids.

Ms Nelson figured the other woman was already sitting in her window seat.

“I double-checked my boarding pass thinking I may have had the wrong row,” Ms Nelson told Newsweek. “When I confirmed I was looking at the correct seat, I thought she must have just mistakenly sat in the wrong seat. So I said, ‘I’m sorry but it seems you’re in my seat’, thinking she would realise it and move.”

But the woman did not. “Oh – you want to sit here?” she reportedly said. “I was pretty surprised at the question but replied simply saying, ‘Yes, that’s the seat I selected’,” Ms Nelson said.

The woman then reportedly told her she was with her two kids who were sitting in the seats next to her window seat. “Oh well I just thought we could switch since these are my kids,” she told Ms Nelson.

At this point, Ms Nelson told her TikTik followers the real reason for refusing to switch with the mother, who offered Ms Nelson a middle seat.

“I get motion sickness during takeoff and landing if I can’t see out the window. I also don’t get a lot of sleep. I often try to get a little sleep on planes which is easiest with a window seat,” Ms Nelson said.

“On that particular day, I only had 90 minutes of sleep the night before,” she said. “And I was headed into a high-pressure work week where I would be presenting to 500 people and really needed to be at my very best so getting a little sleep on that flight was extra-important.”

Ms Nelson’s TikTok video has been viewed more than 1.6 million times so far.

She said the mother was reportedly “super annoyed” before moving back to her own middle seat.

Ms Nelson has received support from TikTok users for her stand.

“People should book seats together if they want to sit together,” one user wrote.

“The amount of families who aren’t paying to select their seats together is mindblowing! You were 100 per cent right to not give up your seat,” said another comment.

“Nope. If it’s not an upgrade it’s a sacrifice,” said another.

“People choose aisle or window for specific reasons (eg sleeping or being close to the toilet). No obligation to switch,” added another user.

Ms Nelson said “people are fed up with people feeling entitled” when it comes to things like this.

“Clearly the woman just expected that I would make a change to meet her needs, not considering what she had done (or not done) that put her in that situation,” she said.

“She just expected me to flex my plans to suit her needs. There seems to be a growing trend of this entitlement in society and I think people are just sick of it.”