Cynthia Appiah just got back from competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. She finished 13th in the monobob and 14th in the two-woman event at the Cortina Sliding Centre, racing alongside brakewoman Dawn Richardson Wilson. A few years before that, she was on a flight from Toronto to Calgary when a couple decided her seat looked better than their own.
Appiah is a national team athlete whose training means she flies between the two cities constantly. Over the years she’s accumulated enough airline points to occasionally upgrade, and on this particular flight she’d used some to book a premium economy aisle seat. She chose the aisle specifically so she could move around freely during the four-hour flight without climbing over anyone. She paid for the upgrade at the time of booking, as she always does, because she doesn’t want to be an inconvenience to other passengers.
She boarded, found her row, and discovered a woman already sitting in her seat. The woman’s boyfriend was next to her in the adjacent window seat. Appiah triple-checked her ticket. The seat was hers.
When she pointed this out, the woman acknowledged it without much embarrassment. She knew she was in the wrong seat, she said. She was just wondering if Appiah might not mind switching with her own seat, just one row back, so she could sit next to her boyfriend for the flight. Her seat was also premium economy, but it was a window seat.
Appiah’s answer was no.
“I told her, nope, I paid for this seat. I would rather stick with my seat,” she said in the TikTok video, as reported by Narcity Canada. “I was just like, I bought the aisle and I’m not moving.”
The woman was upset, but as Appiah noted, she knew there wasn’t much of a fight to be had. She moved. The flight proceeded.
Appiah posted the story to TikTok under the caption “Seat selection is your friend. I promise you,” and it spread rapidly, resonating with the sizable portion of the traveling public who have been in exactly her position. What made her framing stand out was a phrase she used for what the couple had attempted: “Nice bullying.” The strategy of occupying someone’s seat and then sweetly asking them to accommodate you, banking on social pressure to make refusal feel rude. As Appiah put it, people should not “kindly ask, but really bully, people into giving up their seats.”
Her point wasn’t that couples shouldn’t want to sit together. It’s that the time to sort that out is before the flight, not after someone has already paid for the seat you’re sitting in. “If you don’t want to pay for seat selection, then that’s up to you and you deal with the consequences,” she said.
The response in the comments was largely in agreement. A Delta flight attendant with 28 years of experience said that seat swaps are only really reasonable when they involve seats of equivalent value. A window seat for a window seat. An aisle for an aisle. Asking someone to trade a paid aisle upgrade for an unrequested window seat is a different thing entirely.
Appiah grew up in Toronto public housing, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, and was introduced to sport through a Blue Jays community outreach initiative in her neighborhood. She made Canada’s national bobsleigh team through years of work, competed at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and has now completed her second Olympic Games in Milan.
She also recently competed on Jeopardy, incorrectly answered a question about Tim Hortons, and says she may never fully recover. She is, by all available evidence, exactly the kind of person who is going to politely but firmly keep the seat she paid for.
You can follow Cynthia Appiah (@cyndiesel) on TikTok to learn more about her daily life as a bobsleigh athlete.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
