Please, Leave Your Socks On: Passengers Have Voted on The Most Annoying In-Flight Behaviors

For the love of God, people, keep your socks on when you’re on a plane. It’s one of the top annoyances reported by air travelers in a new Expedia survey studying traveler behavior both on planes and in hotels that attempted to discover the written and unwritten etiquette rules of traveling.

Expedia just released its annual results for the Airplane and Hotel Etiquette Study, which surveyed 18,229 travelers from 23 countries about their biggest travel complaints. According to Expedia, on average one person spends 14 nights in a hotel and takes five flights each year.

“Whether you’ve been on one vacation or 100, you’ve likely experienced some form of annoying behavior while traveling,” Nisreene Atassi, Global Head of Communications for Expedia, said in a release. “At Expedia, we want to ensure that every leg of a traveler’s journey is enjoyable. Our goal with this study is to better understand travelers’ biggest pet peeves and offer tips to help them maximize comfort and minimize annoyances.”

For Americans, survey results showed that the top irritations on planes are barefoot passengers, seat kickers or grabbers, and chatty or loud passengers. Across all countries, those rankings changed a bit—the top five are, in this order: seat grabbers and kickers; smelly passengers; inattentive parents; other travelers in your personal space; and noisy chatters.

The study also found some interesting cultural differences. Passengers from South Korea, for example, are the most likely to drink too much on a flight, followed by Thailand and the US. Passengers from the U.K. are most likely to ask someone to unrecline their seat – though across the board, travelers noted they only recline if necessary for sleep or a flight longer than three hours. And watch out if you snore – 54 percent of other passengers will wake you up.

[Photo: Shutterstock]