A lesbian couple travelling with their daughter on Qantas Airlines from Brisbane to Melbourne said they were humiliated when the flight manager continually barraged them with questions about why they would not let a straight married couple take one of their seats.

Kristina Antoniades, a 35-year-old lawyer, was sitting with her partner Merrin Hicks and daughter Lilly in business class, when an elderly man and woman boarded the aircraft whose assigned seats were not together.

Hicks was called over the intercom to Customer Service where she was told that a decision had been made to move her away from her girlfriend and daughter so that a married man and woman could sit side-by-side.

“They did not acknowledge that we were a family and wanted to sit together,” Antoniades said in a Facebook post about her experience.

Soon a disagreement about giving the straight couple preferential treatment ensued, and Qantas eventually backed down and re-issued Hicks her original boarding pass next to her family, and sent them back on board.

However, once airborne, the flight manager saw that the seating arrangements had not been changed and that the straight couple were sitting apart; the man seated next to Hicks and his wife in the row behind them.

The flight manager, according to Antoniades seemed concerned that the assignments had not been amended, and according to Antoniades asked, “Why I [Antoniades] had taken it upon myself to move the wife away from her husband.”

Reemphasizing not only that she and her family had been assigned the seats and that they were a family too, Antoniades produced the boarding passes to the manager who then “simply walked away.”

“I have never experienced such blatant discrimination. It was a terrible experience and I am saddened that our daughter had to witness this,” Antoniades wrote on her page, “I don’t normally post status updates but I thought this needed to be acknowledged for what it was, blatant homophobia and discrimination.”

Qantas has since apologized, saying, “We completely understand that it can be frustrating to be asked to change seats when you have already chosen where to sit. In this case, Kristina, her partner and their daughter travelled in the seats originally assigned to them while the other couple were sat separately."

Hicks and Antoniades were given travel vouchers by the airline for the embarrassing incident.