LONDON: A passenger on a Qatar Airways flight has accused the airline of failing to take proper action when another passenger attacked her.
Travel blogger Julianna Barnaby was on a night flight from Doha to Hanoi on Oct. 17 when the man sitting directly behind her kicked her seat twice and hit her on the head, she said.
Her complaint was not taken seriously, neither by the cabin crew nor by the airline’s customer services department, she added.
“This was an unprovoked assault on me, and if it had happened on the ground, the police would’ve been called. But in the air, no one took appropriate action,” said Barnaby, 32, who lives in London. 
She added that the airline has downplayed the incident, referring to it as an “inconvenience.”
Barnaby said: “As soon as I reclined my seat to go to sleep, I felt two very hard kicks on the back of my seat, and then the passenger behind me reached over and hit me over the head. I turned around and said ‘don’t touch me,’ and then called for a member of the cabin crew.”
She added: “A female flight attendant … asked me if I wanted to move seats, but it was the middle of the night, I was in a window seat so I would’ve disturbed the other two people in my row, and I didn’t see why I should move. But the stewardess said there was nothing she could do as the man didn’t speak English.”
Barnaby said: “I spent the next 10 minutes explaining that I wasn’t going to let this go and they had to find a member of cabin crew who could communicate with this man and give him a verbal warning.”
She added: “Eventually, another female flight attendant came who could speak the man’s language. It seemed to me that he was denying he’d hit me. But another passenger sitting behind him then spoke up, saying he’d witnessed it all and what I said was true.”
Barnaby said the man, who she described as being in his early to mid-60s “but not frail,” had made no attempt to ask her to put her seat forward.
“I had my headphones in because I’d just finished watching a film, but there was no tap on the shoulder or any kind of discussion. I told the flight attendant who spoke the man’s language to tell him that if he touched me again, the first thing I’d be doing after we got to Hanoi was going to a Vietnamese police station,” she added.
“This was battery, but he wasn’t moved, warned or restrained. Of course it’s not the airline’s fault when a passenger behaves badly, but it is the airline’s fault if they don’t deal with it properly.”
Barnaby said the cabin attendants instead helped the man adjust his own TV screen and seat, while she spent the rest of the flight feeling “anxious and scared.”
She said she contacted Qatar Airways immediately after landing in Hanoi, and four more times thereafter.
She questioned the training given to cabin crew, adding that a customer care officer thanked for her feedback but said a review of the incident found the crew had handled it appropriately. Barnaby said the airline has declined to give her a refund.
“I’m so disappointed with Qatar Airways,” she added. “I’ve flown lots of times with them, and have two more flights coming up soon. What happened to me really raises the question of who takes responsibility for an incident in the air.”
Despite several attempts to contact Qatar Airways by email and phone, the airline did not respond to requests for comment.