The Innovative Traveler: Too Pretty to Fly?

I read an amusing story this morning about two teen girls who said they were discriminated against on a Southwest Airlines flight for being 'too pretty'. Nisreen Swedberg and friend Sarah Williams claim that when boarding the plane from Tampa to Los Angeles, flight attendants were rude, refused to serve them water, and questioned Williams about an altercation with another passenger regarding being in the bathroom too long. Once landing in Los Angeles, the women were escorted off the plane by uniformed officers and questioned by the FBI for nearly two hours. No charges were filed.

Here's a picture of the 18-year olds in question. Be forewarned, they are apparently so pretty that their youthful looks can cause a flight ban:

Hmmm.... While they're certainly attractive in an 18-year old sorority girl kind of way, I don't really see how their looks would get them banned from all future Southwest Airlines flights, including the one they were schedule to fly home on. They, however, feel the altercation was due to jealousy. According to Tampa Bay local news, Williams stated “I think they were just discriminating against because we were young decent-looking girls. I mean, nobody else on the plane looked like us except us,” she said. “[The flight attendants] were like older ladies. We were younger. Who knows, they could have been just jealous of us because we were younger.”

Can you sue for being banned from a flight because of jealousy, youth, and beauty? It's peculiar, because I for one am able to look at their picture and still blog about their heroic tale, despite their good looks and youth. I am not blinded nor distracted by their youth and feel I could even sit in a flight next to them without feeling the need to discriminate against them. And I've also been on airplanes with women who looked like runway models, and they somehow avoided being banned for life from the airline.

Admittedly, Southwest Airlines does seem to be in the news an inordinate amount for denying passage to young women wearing proactive clothing, including Kyla Ebbert in 2007. Although she was never banned from Southwest Airlines, she did take up her 'cause' on the media circuit on a slew of shows ranging from Ellen to Dr. Phil. However, these teens make no claim that their negative experience was a result of clothing, whereas both the airlines and Ebbert identify dress code as the problem in Ebbert's case. Ebbert, incidentally, ended up using her 'too sexy to fly' media exploitation to pose nude in Playboy.

So what will be the fate of Nisreen Swedberg and Sarah Williams? I somehow think if this case was taken to the talk-show circuit, they might get a worldwide smack-down for annoying the hell out of us with their inflated egos. Do they site speeding tickets, bad grades, and life problems on being 'too pretty'? Perhaps they will ugly themselves up and try to appear older for their next flight to avoid altercation.

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