Frontier Airlines Workers Fired After Mocking Passenger in Viral Video

Two Frontier Airlines workers have been fired after a video showing a tense exchange between them and a customer who was trying to check into his flight went viral on social media.

According to data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), approximately 2.9 million people travel by plane in the United States every day.

Frontier Airlines operates over 500 flights every day to approximately 100 destinations and employs over 7,000 people, according to its website.

The incident occurred last week at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina and involved a 45-year-old married father of three, whose identity remains unknown, who was checking in for a flight to Boston after a business trip.

Speaking to the New York Post on Wednesday, the man said he had arrived at the airport around 50 minutes before his flight but was unable to check in as he had missed a 60-minute pre-departure window, something he was unaware of. He was then told that he needed to pay a $25 fee to check in.

"They all kind of started chiming in, 'Well, you should have checked the website.' Like not in a professional or polite way. They were like, 'It was your fault for not checking the website. Sorry, it's on you,'" the man told the Post before he said he decided to start filming.

The Post reported that the man said, "I'm never flying this s***ty airline again" when he went to pay the fee, and that's when things started to go south.

Video footage of the incident has circulated widely on social media, having been posted multiple times. Collin Rugg, co-owner of the conservative news site Trending Politics, shared the video on X, formerly Twitter, where it has currently been viewed 16.5 million times as of Friday morning, and another post of the clip on TikTok has 1.7 million views as of press time.

The clip shows the exchange where the man and the employees begin filming each other on their phones.

One employee repeatedly says, "And you thought you was gonna get on your flight?" while the other employee laughs.

"Can you please leave sir? Can you please leave my personal space?" the employee asks.

The man responds: "I'm not in your personal space. This is not your personal space. You work for a company. This is not your personal space." The employee can then be seen leaving the counter.

At one point, one of the employees says that they don't need to "worry about it," to which the man responds, "You're literally not doing your job for a customer that has paid for a plane ticket to get home."

"I'm literally here at Frontier. I bought a ticket and they are not letting me check in," the man says in the video.

The man told the Post that he bought a $500 JetBlue ticket to get home.

The video sparked a debate online, with some social media users criticizing Frontier Airlines and the staff, while others thought the customer was in the wrong.

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