COLEEN’S BIZARRE SPAT OVER PLANE SEATS
FOOTBALLER’S wife Coleen Rooney clashed with a fellow plane passenger yesterday who complained his family had to move seats so she could sit with her children.
Mark Chassin, 51, paid £2,735 for a return flight on airline Jet2 from Manchester to Faro in Portugal for a family holiday, including £60 for pre-booked seats.
But when they checked in for their return flight, they discovered they had been moved to the one place they wanted to avoid – the back row beside the toilets.
When they asked an air stewardess why, she told them it was because Coleen, wife of ex-England captain Wayne Rooney, wanted her party to sit together. Mr Chassin, a financial director, of Denshaw, Greater Manchester, complained he and his partner Lynn Waterhouse, 52, his son Joshua, 15, father Tom, 75, Lynn’s sister Kathryn Pullar, 48, and her partner Richard Townend, 45, were treated differently to Coleen because they do not enjoy her celebrity status.
He said: “I think it is awful that she is treated better than us. We had booked those seats in January. We had a bad experience once of sitting near the toilets so we wanted to avoid that.
“I don’t know why she is more important than us. If it was anyone else they would have been told the seats were already booked.” Mr Chassin, whose partner took a picture of Coleen sitting in the seats they had reserved, added: “We couldn’t eat any food because the smell was so bad.”
Jet2 insisted the passengers had been moved for safety reasons because Coleen, 32, was travelling with children under eight.
A spokesman said: “The aisle seats on the back row of o u r aircraft must be occupied by passengers aged 14 or above, so this
move was necessary for us to meet safety requirements. We have already been in touch with Mark to apologise and offered a full refund of the £60 cost of the pre-booked seats.” Mr Chassin’s decision to go public prompted a furious response from Coleen, who insisted she had been unaware of the switch. “This is the first I know about the situation,” she said on Twitter. “I was given these seats on checkin. I didn’t ask for certain seats, just took what I was given. “The man who’s complaining is trying to make me out as some diva, which I am far from.”