United Passenger Finds ‘Service Dog’ In Their Seat: ‘Stayed the Whole Flight, Butt On The Armrest’
A United Airlines passenger flying from San Diego to Denver boarded their flight to discover a large dog in their seat. Usually it’s a passenger who just sits down where they don’t belong, hoping to squat on the seat. Here it’s a dog.
The animal was too large to fit underneath the seat in front of its owner. It was too large to fit on the floor. So the dog’s owner just had it sit beside them, notwithstanding the seat was assigned to someone else. And the dog bumped the passenger out of the seat.
A United staff member came onboard and spoke to the passenger but the dog remained. Finally, somehow they located another seat for me. The dog stayed on my seat for the whole flight. Totally absurd that an oversized dog can displace a paying passenger from their seat.
The dog was registered as a ‘service animal.’ While the rules for what’s acceptable have been tightened, all that’s required is for a passenger to ‘self-certify’ that their dog qualifies by filling out some paperwork.
Even then, the passenger isn’t entitled to an extra seat for free, let alone someone else’s seat. But that’s what they got here. There was one seat left on the plane, and the other passenger got bumped into it. So much for United’s service animal policy.
Your dog should sit in the floor space in front of your seat. They can’t be in the aisle or the floor space of the travelers next to you.
The passenger who lost their seat was none too amused: “[I]t is nasty to have a dog outside of a carrier sitting on passengers’ seats with his butt on the armrests. The gate agents carefully check the size my carry-on, but apparently they don’t monitor the size of people’s “service” dogs!”
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Here’s a Delta passenger who was just booted from first class for a dog. And in late summer I wrote about a first class passenger booted to accommodate a plus-sized woman with an emotional support dog and 4 carry-ons.
And here’s a dog recently eating at a table in the new Delta One lounge at New York JFK before flying business class. It was hardly the only dog making themselves at home in a Delta lounge.
Last month I was actually on a Delta flight that the pilot turned around due to an unauthorized dog on board, they offloaded the passenger – and then let her and the dog back on. This led to a couple hours’ delay due to a shift change for refueling. The woman spent the flight petting the dog in her lap (hint: it wasn’t really a service animal). Here are 5 easy ways to instantly spot fake service animals.
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