2-15-10

Greetings BLOGGERS!

Saw this article today and it freaked me out, can an airline do this?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article7027725.ece

A Twitter storm has erupted over the ejection of an American film director from a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat.

Kevin Smith was told he could not fly on a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank, California, because he didn’t fit properly in the seat.

Smith, director of “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy”, updated his Twitter account, which has over 1.65 million followers, throughout the incident.

At one point he tweeted: “But, by their own guidelines, I was not, in fact, 2 Fat 2 Fly: the arm rests went down & I could buckle my seat belt w/o an extender. So...?”

Smith, who has travelled with Southwest before, posted a picture of himself onboard the plane with his cheeks puffed out (above).

His Twitter torrent sparked support from fans and prompted Southwest to issue an apology via its Twitter feed, as well as issuing Smith with a $100 voucher.

Southwest’s “Customer of Size” policy requires larger passengers to purchase two seats if they cannot be comfortably accommodated in a single seat. It has been in place for 25 years.

A frequent flier reported a similar incident in June last year. He claims to have been prevented from boarding a Southwest flight from Las Vegas because he was deemed too large to fit in one seat, despite having flown with the carrier up to 50 or 60 times in the previous year alone.

A statement on the airline’s blog said: “This policy is not unique to Southwest Airlines and it is not a revenue generator... If a customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement.”

Both Smith and the airline acknowledged that he had bought two seats for his original flight from Oakland, where he had spoken at the Macworld Expo conference. But he was flying standby in order to catch an earlier flight, and only one seat was available.

The ensuing debate led to a temporary failure of Southwest’s servers due to the weight of traffic, about which Smith commented on Twitter: "Wow. @southwestair servers going down because of traffic from kevinsmith fiasco." They'll blame THAT on my width, too.”

The term “Kevin Smith Twitter” was the 23rd most searched for term in Google at 1pm today. He has used the media attention to highlight the release of his forthcoming movie, Cop Out.

This can't be right, c'mon?

If you are going to attempt to FLY this SPRING choose your airline carefully!!!

WINGO:out