My experience with passengers saving seats has, until last Wednesday, been benign, usually someone saving a middle seat for a traveling parter. Who cares, just take a different middle seat.
However, on 8/7/24, I saw something completely new: WN2587, DAL-LAS, I was B2. I see two empty exit row seats, a woman sitting in the window seat. I start to sit on the aisle, and she says "No, these are reserved."
"The whole row?" I ask.
"Yes."
Shrugging, I take the D seat across the aisle instead (a couple is sitting in E and F).
The woman proceeds to put personal items on the B and C seats, and every time someone asks, she says that they are reserved. Finally towards the end of the Bs someone tells her, "That's not how this works," and starts to move her carry-on luggage from the C seat. She screeches, "Don't touch my property!"
At that point, the FA, who was standing one row back, tells the new passenger, Sorry, there's nothing I can do. In a voice loud enough for the Karen in the A seat to hear, she says something like "It's an unwritten rule, like giving the armrests to the center seat, not kicking the back of the seat in front of you, and so forth. 99% of the passengers know how to behave in public but unfortunately that 1% ruins it for everyone."
The B-5-something grumbles and moves to the back.
Karen doesn't react at all.
This was a completely full flight, and finally Karen's two friends, who were among the last five people on the plane, arrived and took their cushy exit row seats with what I would guess would be C51 and C52.
I've read a lot of stories about people abusing this rule (or lack of a rule) as well as the pre-board. I guess that's part of why Southwest is abandoning "open" seating.
