Poor Onboard Experience and Terrible Customer Service

Hey everyone, I wanted to share a recent, highly disappointing experience I had with STARLUX Airlines, both onboard and with their subsequent customer service.

I am a frequent business traveler, and I actually have many close friends who work within the aviation industry, so I feel like I have a decent understanding of what is and isn't expected behaviour from crew. This was a short-ish flight from Taipei to Macao which is likely why the crew seemed unbothered about a passenger in distress.

As soon as the passenger sat next to me during boarding, I noticed that he seemed really uncomfortable. He asked the flight attendant if he could move to an empty row but she said no. He then remained seated for a moment, and then immediately ran into the bathroom. He only left when we had to sit down for takeoff. Once he was seated, he looked visibly distressed, and when in his seat, he was shaking and twitching so much that it was causing my seat, his seat, and the row in front of us to shake for the entire duration of the flight.

From a passenger perspective, it looked like a genuine medical emergency or a serious mental/physical distress episode.

Once the seatbelt sign went off, he ran back to the bathroom, and as I was concerned, I brought this up to the crew. Because the attendant seemed to struggle to grasp what I was saying in English, I even briefly switched to Chinese to tell her that the passenger seemed unwell and may need assistance.

The attendant then knocked on the lavatory door once, walked away, and completely abandoned the matter. No one monitored the passenger, and no alternative seating was offered to give him space or alleviate the situation. He proceeded to shake, twitch and mutter once he returned from the bathroom, and seemed extremely unwell. I tried to flag down another flight attendant, but was promptly ignored. I also couldn't get up as he was bent over shaking so I was stuck next to him for the remainder of the flight. Even after we landed, he still seemed very unwell, and ran off the plane as soon as the doors opened.

I reached out to Starlux afterward, to highlight a clear gap in their crew’s proactive safety and situational training. The email response I got back from their corporate team was concerning and disappointing:

• They claimed that according to their crew log, the passenger was simply "resting". Twitching violently enough to shake an entire row of seats is not "resting." Moreover, anyone watching would've seen that this passenger was clearly unwell, and may have needed assistance.
• They essentially argued that because I didn’t explicitly demand and instruct the crew to check on the passenger repeatedly, they proceeded to do nothing but the initial check-in. Since when is it the passenger's job to dictate basic welfare monitoring and cabin management to a trained crew?

I raised this incidet to a friend of mine who is an ex-Starlux flight attendant, she sadly wasn't surprised, she informed me that a lot of these attendants are fairly junior, and most likely were just hoping for nothing to happen, and not report it to carry on as usual. My concern is if this was a longer flight, would they act just as indifferent...this was also a half-empty flight so I don't understand why they couldn't have moved him to the empty row beside us so he was more comfortable at least.

TL;DR: Seated next to a passenger experiencing physical/medical distress episode. Crew "checked-in" on him once and then ignored him for the rest of the flight. Starlux customer service responded by claiming the passenger was just "resting" and blamed me for not explicitly telling the crew how to do their jobs. Safe to say, their premium reputation doesn't match reality.