How can so many of you be so wrong?
I’ve written about airplane etiquette before, and I always thought the rules were pretty obvious, but it turns out, not so. Etiquette depends on a shared understanding of right and wrong, and apparently, we can’t even all agree on airplane armrests.
I’ve always thought it was an unwritten but absolute rule that the person in the middle seat gets access to both armrests as a courtesy. However, a 2023 survey by online booking platform Kayak polled more than 1,000 adults and found that more than half of you (57%) disagree with the idea that if you’re in the middle seat, you get to claim both armrests – which is honestly crazy because, in matters of decency, I am always right.
“Obviously we travel a bunch ourselves at Kayak and one of the things that we had noticed increasingly is the airport has always been one of the places where rules are super strictly enforced, but then rules are also out the window,” Matthew Clarke, vice president of North American marketing for Kayak told me. “You can have a margarita at 6:30 in the morning,” but you can’t bring more than 3.4 ounces of liquid through security.
So what’s the deal? Who gets the armrests and what are the other unwritten and unenforceable rules of air travel?
Who gets the armrests?
There’s no definite answer.
Disclaimer: I don’t care about the survey results. I will stick by the adage that the window seat person gets to control the shade, the middle seat person gets…
