Southwest Refuses Singer Jason Derulo an Escort through Security onto Plane, Ruckus Ensues

Singer Jason Derulo (to show you how unhip I am, I had no idea who he was) showed up at the Reno airport on Saturday to fly Southwest to Los Angeles.

Apparently TSA Precheck was closed, and so he demanded that Southwest Airlines provide him with an escort through security. (There are mixed reports that he may not have been in the A boarding group, either.) Derulo became abusive to airline staff after they refused to escort him through security and onto the plane.

Responding to the absuive Derulo, it seems that members of his entourage were told they wouldn’t be allowed to board (so presumably those folks got especially heated) but they proceeded through security and somehow at least one bodyguard accompanied Derulo onto the plane anyway.

Southwest says,

that multiple customers complained about how Derulo’s group was acting and when employees were unable to defuse the situation, airport police were called.

Authorities removed them from the plane.

“His team requested an escort and were denied and they believed the were being treated unfairly,” the source tells PEOPLE. “When they voiced their concerns to the airline they were told they could not fly and proceeded on the plane anyway. At that point the Southwest agent called the authorities and removed them.”

Derulo chartered a plane to fly to Los Angeles. Southwest fully refunded the tickets. And Derulo says he fired his travel agent over the incident. In a spin meant to garner sympathy for Derulo, People points out that “he paid out of his own pocket” for the chartered jet “so that he would not miss his gig.”

Here’s Derulo in a video in his instagram account taken from the chartered plane explaining that his travel agent had done wrong, and a member of his entourage saying “you can’t kick me off of this.”

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Sounds like southwest needs to institute Entourage Boarding for douche bags…after families but before B boarding.

  2. Yeah, I usually consider my flight options between the trade-offs of either Southwest or NetJets…

    Seriously? Talk about polar opposites. Maybe they were confused and thought it was Delta.

  3. Yeah, you aren’t missing much by not knowing who he is. Untalented hack and kind of a d-bag to boot. I’d have denied him an escort too!

  4. Why was he on Southwest? I’m able to avoid Southwest on a law student budget, yet a multi-millioner can’t?

  5. I think Jason Derulo is great. Never knew he had this side to him. For being an “untalented hack”, he sure has had quite a number of hit songs of the past few years.

  6. Scheduled options for non-stops RNO-LAX are pretty lean, so that explains being booked onto SWA.

    As for an escort through security, most of the mainline carriers do provide someone to do just that. It’s really about managing the environment within the terminal, as fans can get unruly and cause issues at both TSA and the gate, which not only impact the VIP, they impact the ability of the airline to properly operate flights.

    If you are a regular flier out of LAX or BUR, you’ll often discover celebrities on the plane that you never saw in the gate area. That’s not a fluke.

  7. “rap being a form of ‘music’ created by one performer shouting obscenities in a singsong voice while other performers torture a cat and throw garbage cans down a flight of stairs”

  8. He doesn’t deserve nor earn a escort…fans, there was no mention of fans in the article, there probably wasn’t any! IF he could afford to Charter a JET home, why didn’t he in the first place?

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