CEO refuses to switch plane seats so mom can sit with her kids

Tammy Nelson is the CEO of jewellery brand CONQUERing

The CEO of a global jewellery brand has opened up about why she refused to switch seats with another woman on a flight. In a now-viral TikTok video, Tammy Nelson, CEO of CONQUERing, said that when she boarded her Delta Airlines flight, she saw another woman was already sitting on her window seat.

The unnamed woman asked Nelson if she would switch seats so she could sit next to her children. This happened on a Delta Airlines flight from Cincinnati, Ohio to San Jose, California – a journey that takes almost eight hours to complete.

“I double-checked my boarding pass thinking I may have had the wrong row,” Nelson told Newsweek. “When I confirmed I was looking at the correct seat, I thought she must have just mistakenly sat in the wrong seat. So I said, ‘I’m sorry but it seems you’re in my seat’, thinking she would realise it and move.”

Instead of moving, the woman asked Nelson: “Oh – you want to sit here?”

“I was pretty surprised at the question but replied simply saying, ‘Yes, that’s the seat I selected’,” Nelson told Newsweek.

The woman then told the CEO that she wanted to sit next to her children, so she took the window seat. She offered Nelson her middle seat instead, which Nelson refused.

In her video, she explained her reasons for not agreeing to swap seats.

“I get motion sickness during takeoff and landing if I can’t see out the window. I also don’t get a lot of sleep. I often try to get a little sleep on planes which is easiest with a window seat,” Nelson said.

“On that particular day, I only had 90 minutes of sleep the night before,” she said. “And I was headed into a high-pressure work week where I would be presenting to 500 people and really needed to be at my very best so getting a little sleep on that flight was extra-important.”

Her viral video has divided opinion on social media, with some saying she should have helped the mother out and others praising her for taking a stand.

However, several commenters criticised the other flyer as “entitled” for sitting on a seat that Nelson had already booked for herself.