The online travel site Expedia says seat kicking earns top honors in its latest Airplane Etiquette Study. The bottom line in the study, says John Morrey, Expedia.com’s vice president and general manager: “Small acts of decorum can go a long way. After all, as it relates to flights, we are quite literally all in this together.”
By the numbers, here’s what Americans liked least about their fellow flyers:
- Sixty-four percent of Americans identified the ever-present rear seat kicker as giving fellow passengers the most grief;
- Fifty-nine percent of Americans said the second biggest problem was inattentive parents, “parents who have no control over, or pay no attention to, their crying, whining or misbehaved children.”
- Fifty-Five percent of survey respondents were of the opinion that so-called “aromatic passengers” posed the biggest obstacle to enjoying a nice flight, those flyers who splash on the perfume or cologne too heavily, or smell bad;
- Forty-nine percent of those taking the survey say “audio insensitive” flyers were the problem, passengers who play their own devices or the airline’s seatback system’s music too high;
- Another 49 percent of passengers found their drunken disruptive fellow travelers just too much;
- Forty-percent cited the “Chatty Cathy’s” of the planet as posing the biggest problem, that person who just won’t be quiet;
- Thirty-five percent of flyers surveyed said the real problem was the “seat-back guy,” the person who just after takeoff reclines their seat fully. So incensed were they that 37 percent of Americans would either like to see reclining seats banned altogether, or at least “restricted times on short-haul flights;”
Here’s where retaliation might rear its head, Expedia’s study discovered that a full 25 percent of those surveyed said they would recline their seat for “retaliatory reasons” if the passenger behind them “showed aggressive behavior or was rude. AirlineRatings observation: In an era where, if not downright dead, chivalry is certainly comatose in some situations “a full 11 percent of those who claim to recline would do so even if the passenger behind them was ‘noticeably pregnant.’”
Drill even more deeply into Expedia’s findings: Americans are really reluctant to address misbehaving passengers directly. Sixty-two percent prefer to alert a flight attendant. Not a bad idea. They’re trained to defuse the situation.
While on the subject of flight attendants there’s this parting nugget of information: Thirty-nine percent of Americans “always pay attention to the flight attendant during safety briefings.”
Expedia’s Airplane Etiquette Study was designed to be representative of the U.S. adult population as a whole. It was conducted online by the GfK ‘KnowledgePanel’ from among 1,005 solicited interviews.
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