The inconsiderate thing would be to have made my 5yo sit alone to be potentially traumatized.
I have a hard time buying the "traumatized" claim. If it was potentially
traumatizing to your child (a VERY strong word), logic would say that you, as the parent, would do everything they could to ensure it doesn't happen versus relying on encroaching on other passengers and in-flight crew to make accommodations for you. As a parent myself, I find it difficult to believe that a mother or father would risk "trauma" for the sake of $10 per person (or thereabouts). I would go without my morning coffee, my daily newspaper, or brown-bag my lunch all month to protect my kid from being put in a possibly damaging or uncomfortable situation.
We ate not rich and we fly den>Knoxville to see family and that flight is very expensive.
We are not rich, either, but we still always pre-purchased assigned seats when we flew Frontier [in the exit row, thankfully, so that a family with small kids could not have us ousted from our seats].
I'm guessing there's a chance that the people who paid for the seat assignments and were displaced by you and your children also don't have gobs of cash to burn (otherwise, they likely wouldn't be flying an ultra low-cost airline in the first place). Perhaps that's why they were so irate when they were asked to move. I wonder if that added expense was a hardship for them as well?
I think its safe to assume that if flying is expensive for you, its quite likely expensive for others as well.
It's obviously not the airline for you.
See, here again I have a hard time seeing the sense in this argument. Before booking, I see it clearly stated on Frontier's website that the only way to ensure you are seated with other members of my party is to purchase assigned seating an at extra cost. So, I pre-purchase seats as recommended and suck up the additional fees to do so. But then you say "it's obviously not the airline for me" because somewhere in the fine print, it says that the in-flight crew has the right to revoke my assigned seating to accommodate people who choose to ignore the very clear instructions that they too were presented with at the time of purchasing their tickets?
Really?
For the record, we haven't flown Frontier in MANY trips......our loyalty, for now, belongs to Delta. But if this kind of entitlement is the new norm for those traveling on that specific carrier, the you're correct in that it definitely won't be the airline for us.