I must admit that I was very anxious about flying for the first time with BOTH of my food-allergy children last week (November 2017). We had flown with my older daughter (allergic to tree nuts) a couple of times before with no issues. We had not yet flown with both and not with my younger child who has a peanut allergy.
For some reason, the recent diagnosis of a peanut allergy in my second child has made me more anxious about public transportation; specifically, flying. I realize it might be as common for another passenger to have a bag of trail mix or salted almonds, but for whatever reason, an entire plane full of passengers eating bags of airline-supplied peanuts almost made me not want to fly at all with my kids. That said, we booked a vacation to Disney, so I made sure to call Southwest ahead of our trip to let them know about my kids’ food allergies.
The customer service representative assured me that she had added the information to our reservation, so that when the crew for our flight brought it up, they’d see that they have 2 passengers with nut allergies on the flight and they wouldn’t serve nuts during the flight. This did make me feel better, but of course I still went ahead with notifying them when we arrived at the airport and we asked to pre-board so that we could wipe down the area around the seats of our choosing. Pre-boarding was seamless, even on a delayed flight switch due to mechanical issues. Actually, another teen boy pre-boarded with us and wiped down a seat for himself so I assume that he had food allergies as well.
Once we boarded we were good to go. I triple-checked (sorry! food allergy mama bear here!) that they wouldn’t serve peanuts on the plane and they assured me they wouldn’t. Someone in the row ahead of actually asked for them and I heard the flight attendant say sorry, they wouldn’t be able to do that because they had passengers with allergies. To get the point, Southwest was extremely accommodating of my requests for my kids and we will definitely recommend flying with them to other families who have food allergies. We currently have a Southwest companion plan in place, and plan to continue to fly Southwest in the future. Thanks Southwest!
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