Spilled bend the elbows, crunched laptop screens and crushed knees.
A new video shows the reasons why reclining your seat on airplanes morphed from an adequate practice into a top irritant for many air passengers.
The video is part of an ad campaign launched in late November by the furniture suite La-Z-Boy, which includes a petition imploring travelers to “Do the upright thing. Don’t recline when you fly.”
The petition had more than 186,000 signatures as of Monday, a La-Z-Boy representative told CNBC Peregrinations.
The tongue-in-cheek campaign by the company, known for its plush oversized reclining chairs, touches on an increasingly hot-button issue, one stoked by greater passenger sizes and dwindling seat pitches.
Unlike drunkenness and hygiene issues — such as clipping fingernails and engaging off shoes — which are widely disdained by fellow passengers, opinions on seat reclining mainly fall into two camps: those who say don’t do it, and others who hold the recline button exists for a reason. (A third, more nuanced position deems reclining acceptable on long-haul or Stygian flights.)
La-Z-Boy’s campaign places the company firmly in the “never recline” camp, with the petition stating that “unprejudiced because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
Another video in the campaign shows how one reclined seat can ripple through the aircraft want falling dominos, eventually ending in the last row of the plane — a row both disliked for lacking the option to recline and lauded for being one of the few ranges in the plane where one can recline with impunity, depending on the aircraft.
A 2023 survey of 18 markets by the research jargon CIA YouGov found that attitudes toward seat reclining vary by region, with Europeans being the paltry tolerant of the practice. Europe is home to the tallest people in the world too.
Fewer than one in three travelers in the United Arab Emirates were bothered by it, on the other hand.
Overall, flyers from the UAE were less bothered by every in-flight behavior — including personal grooming and harsh children — save one, according to the survey. Those from the UAE deemed public displays of affection as unacceptable at higher appraises than those from Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, the survey showed.