I wanted to share my own experience with SW as a person who needed to buy an extra seat.
Several years ago I was over 300+ pounds and was told I would need to purchase the extra seat even though I was flying with my mother and even though the flight was not full. ( they did not ask my mother to move, btw) I did this and made sure to prepurchase an extra seat for the trip home. I had flown about 5 times previously with sw with family members but had not been asked to purchase the extra seat.
On the flight back, the plane was full and the aisle with my mother and I had the one empty seat. SW sold this to a gentleman flying stand-by, even though this was a seat I had purchased. I did not get a refund because I was told it was up to me to tell the man not to sit there, but he had been seated there by a SW attendant. Had I told him he could not sit there, that would be me telling him he could not fly on that flight. I did not feel at all comfortable doing that. Again, I was not refunded.
The problem is that there is such a randomness on how this policy is enforced. If SW would simply enforce it regularly prior to boarding and clearly state when you buy the ticket that you will have to purchase a second seat if you are very overweight, there would be no incidents like the one Kevin Smith has exposed.
The fact that the gate attendant wanted to know if Smith was a Revenue passenger says to me that this is probably about a non rev employee friend/family member needing that last seat and Smith was the easiest one to boot since he was flying stand by and was big. Otherwise they would have booted all the obese passengers and they did not.
The issue is not whether the obese should have to purchase extra seats, its that the policy is not enforced correctly and without humiliation. You do NOT take one fat guy off a plane once they have been seated for this issue while letting others of the same size stay.
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