Love at First Flight: Woman Told Fellow Passenger She Thought They'd Marry. Now They're Engaged! (Exclusive)

Daniel Gutierrez took the empty seat that Sasha Ebrahimi was hoping to use for a nap. Soon, "Sparks were flying," she tells PEOPLE of meeting the stranger-turned-soulmate

With an empty seat beside her, Sasha Ebrahimi was planning to stretch out and catch some sleep on her seven-hour overnight flight to London via Reykjavik, Iceland, from Denver in April 2022. But then a flight attendant notified her that she needed to fill the seat on the nearly full flight.

“I thought, ‘Oh gosh, this is not what I wanted,’" recalls Ebrahimi, 25, then a Pepperdine University graduate student who was taking a class in London. “But as soon as I saw him, I thought, 'This is going to be great.'"

Daniel Gutierrez, 35, was also on his way to London with a stopover in Iceland when he took his seat beside Ebrahimi. He couldn’t believe his luck when the woman beside him was the same attractive female he spotted earlier at the airport.

“It’s funny because I had already noticed her in the airport,” recalls Gutierrez, a network engineer at Vail Resorts who was traveling with a friend. “I already thought she was beautiful the first time I saw her. So I was like, ‘Now I get to sit for the seven-hour flight with a beautiful woman.’”

For the next several hours, they talked non-stop about their lives, hobbies and their shared interest in travel. This was Gutierrez’s first trip to Europe, so he was eager to gather travel tips from Ebrahimi, who had studied abroad in Paris and had traveled extensively within Europe.

“We talked about places we want to go to,” recalls Ebrahimi.

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“She gave me lots of really great tips that I used in travels in London and Ireland because she’s very well-traveled,” says Gutierrez, who ended up drinking Guinness beer in Dublin, trying Indian food in London and visiting a gas station in Ireland full of U.S. President Barack Obama memorabilia because of Ebrahimi's suggestions. “Her tips were great.”

Unbeknownst to Gutierrez at the time, Ebrahimi already had a strong feeling that Gutierrez was destined to be her husband.

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“About an hour into the flight, I said to myself, ‘I am going to marry this man,’” she recalls. “And as soon as I got off the plane, I texted my friend Claire and said, ‘I just met my husband on the plane.’”

“I think it was his genuineness,” she says. “He was very calm. I am a very chaotic person. It was easy for us to connect. And I think that was the biggest thing, like I didn’t feel like I was trying too hard. The conversation just flowed naturally.”

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Not sleeping a wink after talking all night, Gutierrez and Ebrahimi exited the plane in Reykjavik and said awkward goodbyes.

“I didn’t know If I should hug her yet or not,” says Gutierrez. “And my friend was standing there and we had just met. I wish I would have at least hugged.”

Luckily, an hour before landing in Iceland, the duo exchanged phone numbers so they could remain in touch.

“I think I said something like, ‘Oh, give me your number and I’ll send you some places to see,’” says Ebrahimi. “That’s how I worded it. I was going to do that, but it was also a ploy.”

After spending 10 hours of her layover walking around the city of Reykjavik, visiting the landmark church Hallgrimskirkja (which overlooks the city) and sampling local beer Gull, Ebrahimi eventually boarded her to flight to London.

“A couple of days went by and he hadn’t texted me yet — and he had my number too,” she recalls. “I was waiting and waiting, and one of my friends was like, ‘Just text him first.’ So I did. We started texting and made plans to meet up in Scotland at the end of the week.”

“I was very nervous when I saw his text,” she says. “I had butterflies, which doesn’t really happen to me.”

They met in Edinburgh on the Royal Mile. Ebrahimi walked out of her hotel and tried to cross the street, but there was a huge crowd in front of her. As the crowd dispersed, Gutierrez appeared on the other side of the street.

“It was a very cute, romantic moment,” she says. “I was 100% percent excited to meet him.”

“We had our first kiss in Edinburgh,” says Gutierrez. “Sparks were flying.”

After spending the day together, they went their separate ways again, and Ebrahimi sent a text message to Gutierrez, while he was in Manchester, England.

“She said, ‘All cards on the table,’ in a text message,” he recalls her writing. “She was like, ‘I wanted to tell you that an hour into our flight I told myself, ‘I want to marry this man.’”

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“I felt a sudden rush of heat in my face, like I was going to faint, honestly,” he says, laughing. “I had so many butterflies and I would say some kind of adrenaline. That’s a big statement to say to someone you just met, right?”

They made plans to meet up again in Amsterdam and shared their first official date in the Dutch city.

“That was really cool because it wasn’t planned,” says Gutierrez. “It was totally spontaneous. And that’s how it’s been ever since.”

After returning to U.S., the couple have been inseparable, eventually moving in together in Lone Tree, Colorado. They became engaged in December when they traveled to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic for Ebrahimi’s birthday.

“He surprised me with a romantic dinner on the beach and proposed to me,” she says.

On Aug. 12, 2023, the couple will marry at the Omni Hotel in Broomfield, Colorado, with 270 guests in attendance. They plan to pay tribute to Gutierrez’s Mexican background by having a mariachi band perform during the reception and by also doing the “dollar dance” and “snake dance.”

To honor Ebrahimi’s Persian heritage, the couple intends to place several items that symbolize the different aspects of marriage on a large table, including nuts, candy, fruit, candles, flowers, eggs and a needle and thread.

“You sit at that table, and the women who are closest to you in your life come up behind you and hold a cloth over your head and rub two sugar cones together while the ceremony is proceeding to sweeten the marriage,” she says.

Because travel has brought the couple so much joy already — and brought them together — they intend to make it a big part of their married life. They have also traveled to Napa Valley, Lake Tahoe, Georgia, South Carolina and Panama as a couple and have no plans to slow down.

“We definitely see kids in the future,” says Ebrahimi, who now does contract management for a company in the defense industry. “As soon as the baby can get a passport, we are getting him or her on a plane.”

She looks back in wonder at how she crossed paths with her fiancé, since she had been living in Colorado Springs at the time and Gutierrez was in Denver — more than an hour's drive apart.

“I don’t think we would have ever met each other if it wasn’t for Icelandair,” Ebrahimi says.

In recognition of the special role the Nordic airline played in bringing the couple together, Icelandair is giving them tickets to Iceland as a wedding present.

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