An influencer has claimed she had no choice but to hold her five-month-old baby for 12 hours on a flight home from the Maldives.
Billie Faiers – widely known in the UK for her appearance on the reality show The Only Way Is Essex – spoke about the “nightmare” trip she went on with her husband Greg Shepherd and their three young children.
Opening up on her podcast with her sister Sam, the mom of three said she was denied an in-flight bassinet for her baby girl Margot as there were none available when they were traveling back to the UK.
She said: “I had a nightmare. We get on the plane and going out there we had the bassinet for Margot, which is what you get when you have a young baby.
“Going out, it’s great because where the bassinets are you get the legroom as well, so you know with a baby you’ve got all the stuff and you’re always in and out of the baby bag.
“Anyway, we get on the flight and they’re like ‘really sorry the bassinets broke’. One bassinet on the whole flight.”
Billie – who also shares her two older children Nelly and Arthur with Greg – went on to say: “So I had to hold Margot in my arms for 12 hours – Greg and mum helped as well. I just thought ‘please don’t do this to me’.
“She’s at the age now – she’s five months – she doesn’t want to be restricted in my arms for 12 hours, but we had no choice.”
Sam – the 33-year-old TV personality’s sister – shared a similar story of a flight she took from Dubai back to the UK with her son Edward.
“Obviously it wasn’t as long but is like six or seven hours,” she said. “No bassinet at all and Edward is 11 months and he’s heavy. Paul and I had to hold him the whole flight because the bassinet seat was taken.”
She continued: “We were like ‘Well I requested a bassinet seat. I understand that seat might be taken, but it was a couple that had those four seats with no baby.
“And I was like ‘can you swap us please because you can see I’ve got a baby here that’s 11 months that’s going to want to lay out and sleep’ and I had the same issue.
“She wouldn’t move us and I was like, ‘but we have a baby, surely the baby comes over legroom’ – unless you’re really elderly or something, but these were a couple in their 30s and 40s. It was bad’.”
