Selfie Sticks vs Seat Kickers: The Biggest Travel Peeves of 2015
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APEX Insight: As we begin the hectic holiday travel season, it helps to engage in a little self-reflection. With thicker crowds, longer waits, and flights more likely to be delayed by foul weather, even frequent flyers may find themselves with shorter tempers during the festive season. In that spirit of reflection, let’s shine a light on passengers’ biggest pain-points by looking at the biggest travel pet peeves of 2015.
Travel dating site MissTravel asked over 58,000 people what drove them nuts while traveling. The number one result, with 42 percent hating it, was the selfie stick. In declaring the selfie stick dead, a MissTravel press release read, “It seems the majority of travelers would rather sacrifice the perfect selfie than endure a flock of tourists carrying selfie sticks. Outlawed from most historic sites and even The Happiest Place on Earth, respondents agree this tool is ‘The Biggest Travel Pet Peeve of 2015.'”
Coming in a distant second place: those who hog the overhead bin, followed by people who take photos with iPads (which isn’t just a travel thing, if you think about it).
Meanwhile, Expedia released a 2015 travel pet-peeve list of its own, focused solely on the airline journey itself. This survey, conducted by market research group GfK, polled a smaller pool of 1,019 respondents. The biggest pain according to the survey results: that passenger kicking the back of your seat. Sixty-one percent of respondents hate that guy. A very close second place: inattentive parents, followed by stinky passengers. (Interestingly, flirty singles made Expedia’s list, perhaps to MissTravel’s dismay.)
It seems as if, to borrow from Mark Twain, reports of the selfie stick’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Using an operational search on Twitter, we can see that negative selfie-stick chatter tends not to be about the sticks themselves. Rather, we see people lamenting the loss of their beloved extendable poles, or complaining about not being able to use them. Seat kicking was a bit harder to isolate, but the practice has earned universal scorn. After all, who aside from a three-year-old would publicly come out in favor of kicking the back of strangers’ seats?
How do passengers deal with these affronts to our sanity at cruising altitude? Quietly, as it turns out: Sarah Waffle Gavin, Expedia’s head of Communications, notes, “In the event a fellow passenger misbehaved noticeably, 49 percent of respondents would sit quietly and attempt to ignore them, while 21 percent would confront the offender directly and 10 percent would surreptitiously record them using a phone’s camera or video camera. Only 3 percent of respondents would publish the misbehavior across social media.”
Dragging these annoyances into the light can rob them of their power over us. After all, we’re all in this together, at least for the duration of the flight, so let’s wrap this up on a positive note: the Expedia study found that air travelers are actually a pretty friendly lot, with 75 percent of respondents saying, “For the most part, fellow passengers are considerate.” Just remember that if someone starts kicking the back of your seat, try to refrain from jabbing them with your selfie stick.