Plane Passenger Seemingly 'Got Played' By Couple Swapping Seats to Sit Together: 'Is Seat Karma a Thing?'

Mar. 15, 2025

Photo:Getty

Getty

One traverl is wondering if “seat karma is a thing,” after giving up his plane seat so a couple could sit together.

The passenger says he was already in his window seat when he was tapped on the shoulder. It was the man in the middle seat next to hers. He made it apparent he didn’t speak English, then proceeded to hold out his phone with a Japanese to English translation app open for the window seat passenger to read his request, the original poster (OP) recounted onReddit.

“Can you please swap seats with my wife?” the message read.

The man in the middle seat then pointed in the direction of where his wife was sitting, which was across the aisle in the opposite row, with a window seat.

“I go… sure no problem! And switch over to 12F,” the OP continues.

Woman gives up her window seat to couple.Getty

“SIR IS YOUR SEAT 12F????” he recounts the agitated newcomer asking,

OP explained. “No it’s not… I was in 12A… I gave her my seat so she could sit with her husband,”

Turns out the man’s wife was sitting in the wrong seat, next to the window, when in fact she was assigned the middle seat. When the OP realized he quickly apologized to the man, whose seat he had mistakenly taken, and slid over to occupy the middle seat.

The OP writes that he attempted to get the couple’s attention on the crowded flight across the aisle, but that they looked at him “like a deer in headlights.”

For the duration of two hour flight from Orlando to Washington D.C., the OP sat in their new middle seat while wondering if “seat karma” could potentially be in the couple’s future.

“Hopefully it carries forward,” the man wished in his Reddit post.

Fellow Reddit users sympathized with the OP. One user wrote they will be taking precautions in the future if a similar situation presents itself.

“This makes me feel like if I’m ever asked to do a seat swap I should ask for the other person’s boarding pass just to verify,” one user wrote.

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Other users told the man he should have called for a flight attendant to restore the parties back to their original seating positions.

“I’d be questioning whether or not you got played,” one user wondered, to which another quickly replied, “You got played.”

source: people.com