What’s more infuriating than your average double-booking mishap by budget airlines? One passenger flying Indonesian low cost carrier Lion Air took to social media recently to complain about being assigned a seat that didn’t even exist on her plane.
Yesterday, a Facebook user by the name of Satwika Ika posted about her experience flying Lion Air from the city of Palembang to Jakarta on Sept. 16. She wrote that as soon as she boarded the flight, she wasn’t able to find her assigned seat, 35F, because the seats in the plane only went up to row 34.
https://www.facebook.com/ika.satwika/posts/10217313106569013
Not only that, Satwika said the flight attendants were generally unhelpful and quite rude. She was told to sit in row 34, only for the assigned passenger to come and remove her from the seat. Satwika said she got in an argument with one of the flight attendants after she refused to be moved to another empty seat in case she would have to move again.
Eventually, a ground crew member came on board and had Satwika take an unassigned seat. Satwika noted that several other passengers, including a family with a small child, shared the same fate.
She claims she received no apology from any of the Lion Air crew members that day.
After the post went viral, having been shared over 4,000 times at the time of writing, Lion Air issued an explanation (but still no apology, it seems) for the seating confusion. According to the airline, they had to switch Satwika’s flight to a smaller plane due to a scheduling conflict caused by delays that day.
“JT-1341 should have been operated by a Boeing 737-900ER plane with a maximum capacity of 215 and 39 rows of seats,” Lion Air Corporate Communications officer Danang Mandala Prihantoro wrote in an official statement, as picked up by Detik today.
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