Sorry to read about your unpleasant experience
Lomo. Looks to me CD has given the definitive answer. Perhaps it´s worth your trouble to get in touch with SW and save the e-mail hard copy for next time you fly them?
Shack, there´s is no answer that covers all airlines.
This is an informative
article to start off with.
My airline has a policy for passengers of size. Buy two seats, get part of the second seat refunded if the aircraft´s not full in your section.
Ground staff NEVER enforces it. Check-in 'doesn´t notice' that a pax is obese. And for those who check in online, gate staff checking boarding cards and passports clearly suffers from the same visual impairment.
So we´re left to deal with the growing problem on board.
For which we have again a policy.
If there are empty seats in the same class, reseat other pax so the obese one gets two seats. If no empty seats in the same class, find a frequent flyer and upgrade him or her to create a spare seat for the obese passenger.
If all sections are full, off load the obese person. Be very discrete about it all.
That´s the official policies.
Unofficially, we know it´s very iffy to off load any large body in the USA, or any large US pax wherever in the world. Cause they´ll sue the sox off the airline, blaming everybody but themselves for being too large to fit in an normal seat.
Never mind the fact that they hugely inconvenience their neighbours by overflowing their own seats. And then of course there is also the tiny matter of once you off load a pax, you need to search for their luggage in the hold and off load that as well. Causing an inevitable delay for 300+ other people, at least half of whom will subsequently miss their connecting flight. Thereby missing the funeral / wedding / birth of child / business meeting / grand child´s birthday party / cruise / graduation or whatever else was the purpose of their trip.
Catch22 anybody?
The more I have to deal with this, the more it annoys me.
It´s anybody´s right to be obese. But why oh why do others have to suffer for it?
And why the heck am I regularly placed in the exceedingly uncomfortable position of the Shrew from Hell trying to deal in a customer friendly manner with problems created by inconsiderate, unthinking, chip-on-their-shoulder obese people?
And don´t get me started on the skinny unwashed & stinky. Smelling so bad that the pax around them start crying, choking and loudly wailing about refusing to travel for x-many hours of long haul cooped up in close proximity with somebody emitting the pungent odour of old sweat on an unwashed body and ditto clothes!
And of course it´s my job to give the ponger the happy news.
However discrete I do it, however carefully I phrase it, and covertly offer soap, deo and on occasion even my own clean shirt out of my flight bag, I always bløødy end up being blamed. For THEIR self-caused embarrassment.
<I shall now have a calming glass of single malt and read a soothingly bland book
>