Airline compensates man who endured overseas flight seated in someone else’s urine

IMAGINE spending more than R20 000 on a flight and then having to spend the journey sitting in someone else’s urine.

A businessman from the United Kingdom claims this is exactly what happened to him. On Sunday several UK publications ran Andrew Wilkinson’s story.

According to the Mail Online‚ the 39year-old boarded a British Airways flight to Cape Town to visit his family. He was reportedly given a seat on which a previous passenger had urinated. “After finding his seat in economy‚ he noticed it was damp.

Mr Wilkinson‚ from south London‚ said: ‘I called the stewardess, who agreed the dampness was urine. She went to the toilet and came back with some wipes and expected me to clean up the mess myself.

“I told her‚ ‘I can’t sit here’ but she just laughed. Her response was‚ ‘I can see you are going to work me really hard on this flight‚ aren’t you?’,” the article read.

Wilkinson covered the seat with a plastic bag and then a blanket.

Apparently the airline could not move Wilkinson to another seat because the flight was completely full.

The Irish Sun reported that after Wilkinson “expressed his rage on Twitter’’ the airline offered him “5 000 of their Avios reward points in compensation”.

He was then allegedly given a flight voucher that was valued at more than R7 000.

In a statement‚ British Airways said: “We are very concerned to hear about this and have been in touch with our customer to apologise and make amends.

“The cleanliness of our aircraft is of the utmost importance to us and our planes are cleaned thoroughly after every flight.

“We also perform frequent spot checks to make sure our cleaners are maintaining our high standards.” — DDC