Airborne passengers can enjoy some peace and quiet, until someone kicks your seat from behind. Expedia's 2015 Airplane Etiquette Study revealed rear-seat kickers are the worst co-passengers.
If a totally neutral experience doesn't work, putting on earphones can effectively shut down a chatty seatmate. However, talkative and semi-drunk passengers aren't the only annoying people onboard. In fact, in Expedia's recent survey, they didn't even make the top 3.
Survey showed that rear-seat kickers (61 percent) are the most hated co-passengers, followed by negligent parents (59 percent) who allow their noisy kids to run wild while airborne, and third, smelly passengers (50 percent) who are enough to make co-passengers feel like they have lost a Russian roulette up in the air.
The Expedia survey showed that 37 percent of passengers are willing to pay extra money just to be transferred to a quiet zone and avoid chatty seatmates. However, when it comes to the other airborne nuances, many just choose to stay quiet and perhaps flare up internally until the flight is over. Numbers showed that 21 percent confront annoyances directly while only 10 percent admit recording the nasty passengers on their devices for possible future online shaming.
"Interestingly and sadly, if you ask me - these same three passengers led the charge for worst in the 2014 Airplane Etiquette Study. That means passengers haven't changed their bad behaviors much in 12 months, or that our tolerance for certain egregious behaviors hasn't changed," wrote Sarah Waffle Gavin, Head of Communications at Expedia, Inc.
Another interesting but somewhat worrying fact is that one percent of American airline passengers are members of the so-called 'mile-high club'. Members here often engage in romantic adventures while up in the air. Putting this in context, the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported that 64 million people flew in January alone, which means 640,000 passengers made the most out of the no-seatbelt sign. While this figure doesn't factor in frequent fliers and the number of times they got frisky on board, one percent of the total passengers in one year is not as little as it seems.
The Expedia survey was conducted by Gfk, an internal market research firm, who covered approximately 1,019 American adults in August. The survey is meant to encourage passengers to be more respectful to others during flights. The findings were published on Expedia on Nov. 10.
