“You’re saying you’re gonna give that away to someone else when I paid for that seat?” Brian Schear says to an airline employee. “That’s not right.”
Eventually he agreed to hold his son on his lap for the flight - but it was too late. The airline said the whole family had to leave.
That was around midnight, and the couple and their two toddlers were left having to scramble for a hotel room and pay $2,000 for another flight the next day, on United.
Schear says he originally bought the seat for his 18-year-old son Mason, but then decided to send him home on an earlier flight so that he could use the seat for his younger child, Grayson, who was placed in a car seat.
The airline staff tells him they need the seat because the flight is overbooked and the original passenger whose name was on the seat isn’t using it. One airline employee tells him that under FAA regulations, 2-year-old children are not supposed to have their own seats at all and are supposed to sit in parents’ laps for the duration of the flight.
“With him being two, he cannot sit in the car seat,” one airline employee tells him. “He has to sit in your arms the whole time.”
The accuracy of that statement is not entirely clear, as the websites for both the FAA and Delta appear to encourage parents to buy separate seats for young children and use a child safety restraint system.
RELATED: FAA tip sheet for traveling with small children
“We want you and your children to have the safest, most comfortable flight possible,” Delta’s website advises parents. “For kids under the age of two, we recommend you purchase a seat on the aircraft and use an approved child safety seat.”
Schear says Grayson flew in his own seat on the original flight out to Hawaii without a problem. He says Delta knew he was planning to use the seat for his younger son when they boarded their return flight.
“You need to do what’s right,” he tells the airline employee. “I bought the seat and you need to just leave us alone.”
The encounter came as the airline industry is already facing bad publicity for video that showed a doctor being forcibly dragged off an overbooked Chicago flight on United, resulting in a concussion, broken nose and two lost teeth.
Eyewitness News reached out to Delta for comment, but has not heard back. The Schear family says the airline reached out to them earlier Wednesday to find out more information after they posted their encounter on Facebook and YouTube and began talking to Eyewitness News.
I bet they did reach out. If it's as the customers said, they're going to have free flights for a long time.
The airline staff tells him they need the seat because the flight is overbooked
= = =
LA Channel 5 reported that Delta said it was NOT overbooking.
Still waiting for responses.
May be a problem with the seat originally for the 18-year old son. They did pay for it.
I think Delta might have assumed they could get the seat, then got their backs up when challenged.
I hope this family gets a good lawyer who takes Delta to the cleaners!!!
I hope this family gets a good lawyer who takes Delta to the cleaners!!!
There you go. The passenger assigned to that seat did not check in. The seat becomes available to someone else that is at the gate waiting to board.
The airline employees saw a seat that was unoccupied.
The parents boarded the child without a ticket.
The point is to punish in such a way that the action does NOT happen again. Make an example of the perp.
Overbooking is fraud, pure and simple. The airlines only get away with it because they are large and powerful and connected corporations.
As with ANY time an individual or entity does wrong, the repercussions should be of sufficient severity to dissuade others from doing the same.
If EVERY overbooking cost the airline millions in damages, eventually they will stope doing it.
I like the ability of social media to level the playing field between the individual and the big powerful entity.
Stupid should hurt. You can’t hurt a corporation physically, you can financially. Bumping someone who has paid for a ticket is both FRAUD (regardless of any weasel words on the back of the ticket on the click-through) and stupid; EVERY incident of it should HURT badly enough to make even a multi billion dollar corporation take notice.
Schear says he originally bought the seat for his 18-year-old son Mason, but then decided to send him home on an earlier flight so that he could use the seat for his younger child, Grayson, who was placed in a car seat.
“”Schear says Grayson flew in his own seat on the original flight out to Hawaii without a problem. He says Delta knew he was planning to use the seat for his younger son when they boarded their return flight.””
I don’t understand - Grayson is apparently the child who was occupying the seat that the older son didn’t take..he had his own seat on the flight to HI - what happened to that seat and ticket?