Stuck with seatmates

Screaming babies. Chatty tourists. Jittery first-timers.

To the frequent travelers who get trapped next to these passengers, the trauma can leave permanent psychological, if not physical, scars.

Just ask Eva Weems. On a sold-out flight from Orlando to Raleigh, N.C., she sat next to a man who weighed “no less than 600 pounds” and perched on top of the armrests in the center seat next to her. “I was completely squeezed into the window,” recalls Weems, a purchasing specialist for the U.S. Postal Service. “I couldn’t move and couldn’t even see past him.”

She was so wedged into the side of the plane that she lost all feeling in her arms. To make matters worse, her flight attendant acted indifferent to her suffering.

“He’s got a right to fly, too, you know,” Weems was scolded.

That may be, but passengers have other rights, too-such as the right to a seat, to some degree of privacy and to some measure of comfort. In this era of shrinking airline seats, expanding airline profit margins and disappearing advance boarding passes, those rights are being violated more and more.

On a trip from Frankfurt, Germany, to Orlando not so long ago, I sat next to a first-timer who wanted to tell me about his job as a pet photographer. In excruciating detail.

Fortunately, I had packed my frequent flier kit: earplugs, an eyepatch, sleeping pills and saline solution (for dry eyes). I washed two pills down with a beer, wrapped the eye patch around my head and plugged my ears after meal service. When I woke up, we were on a final approach.

Whether it’s an invasion of your space or just your peace, the key question is, do you have the right to determine who sits next to you?

You should. Airlines tag passengers with special needs in their computers-a child traveling alone, for instance.

But you can’t access that information, and neither can your travel agent. Besides, how do you phrase a seating request without sounding like a callous idiot: “I don’t want to be next to anyone with problems.”? Come on.

Even in cases where you want to sit next to someone, it’s not always that simple, as Tom and Louise Hranicka of Avon, N.C. discovered. A few months ago, the couple booked a trip to the South Pacific with their 10-year-old granddaughter, Lorin.

“All arrangements went fairly smoothly with the exception of our return flight from Tahiti,” says Tom Hranicka. “The challenge that we faced was that we were told by our travel agent that we could not get seat assignments for the return flight until check-in and that it was possible that we may not get even two seats together. The prospect of our granddaughter sitting alone on an eight-hour night flight was unthinkable.”

His travel agent and tour operator insisted they were powerless to keep the family together. “Receiving no satisfaction from the travel agencies and feeling that any request out of the ordinary was a great inconvenience to them, we contacted the air carrier directly. After several minutes of consulting with a supervisor, the reservationist assigned us three seats together,” he says.

Steve Loucks, a spokesman for the American Society Of Travel Agents in Alexandria, VA, says agents are often just as frustrated as travelers like the Hranickas. “There comes a point in every flight where the airline closes off the seat assignments,” he explains. “Travel agents have to play by the airlines’ rules, and then the airlines break their own rules. It makes the agent look like a fool.”

He concedes, “If you’ve exhausted your options with a travel agent, go to the carrier and see what you can do.”

That may be the best advice for anyone who wants to avoid sitting next to a difficult passenger as well. An airline reservationist can see every so-called “special request” booking and move your seat far away from trouble.

But there are limits to what a carrier can do. When it comes to screaming babies, the system isn’t fail-safe. Since infants fly free, it’s not necessary to tell anyone-not your agent, not the airline-that you’re taking junior along. Nobody knows.

Better bring those earplugs just in case.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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