A mother traveling by train with her two young children insisted on claiming her three reserved seats for herself and her children when “three Americans sitting there from a big tour group” refused to move for her, she related.
“I boarded the train from London to Paris yesterday with my family,” she wrote on social media, sharing her story with other Reddit users.
“When we got to our booked and assigned table seats, there were three Americans sitting there from a big tour group,” she said.
The mom added in her post, “Their argument was that someone had taken their seats (and they wouldn’t tell me which seats were originally theirs).”
However, the mother said she had her “5-year-old and 9-year-old” with her — and she did not want to be separated from her children “for two hours.”
So “I refused to give up our designated seats and forced them to move,” she wrote on the subreddit known as AITA (“Am I the a–hole?”).
She added in her post about the American women — who were apparently in their late 20s, as she noted in a later edit to her story — “When we got off at the other end, the girls gave me [a] huge stink eye.”
The mother then asked others if she was in the wrong for insisting the young women move out of her seats.
More than 2,400 people reacted to the mothers’ post in less than five hours — with over 400 writing detailed replies to the woman’s message, the Reddit post indicated.
Wrote one responder, garnering over 4,000 “upvotes” for this comment, “You wouldn’t be wrong if you didn’t have children. You wouldn’t be wrong if you just wanted to sit there because you wanted to sit there.”
The responder added, “They were your assigned seats. You wanted to occupy them. You weren’t wrong for making the [people] who decided to take them move.”
Another person also piped up, saying to the original poster, “Isn’t every seat on Eurostar reserved? If someone is in their seats, then that person needs to move. Not you.”
This same commenter added, “They obviously wanted the table seat. They should have booked sooner.”
Someone else wrote, “Americans like that give the rest of us a bad name. I promise, most of us actually know how to act in public.”
Still another person wrote, “You have no obligation to put strangers ahead of you and your family.”
Wrote a different commenter, “I’ll never understand why people think it’s OK to sit in seats when other people have literally purchased them.”
Yet another commenter took umbrage at one aspect of the mother’s account of what happened.
This commenter wrote, “Why mention their nationality? There were just three people in your seats. They were being entitled.”
Another person who replied to the mother’s story had a much simpler and far more direct message about the entire escapade.
“An assigned seat is an assigned seat. End of discussion.”