I travel every week to another state for work and have see in all. From crying babies to armrest hoggers to foot odor there are certain things that just grind my gears. There is only so much I can take before my blood boils.
What are your traveling annoyances and where do you draw the line?
Reply to this When I am not travelling I read a lot about travel, especially on internet forums, and am often pleased to realise that arm rest battles, and people with boiling blood and grinding gears are not nearly as frequent as the internet leads me to think.
The travel thing that irritates me often are touts, especially in countries where they are there every time I step outside, all day everyday.
Touts Reply to this Oh how ironic I find this topic today...just flew in from..ahem...Bali on a flight 19 hours after the one I was booked on but was not allowed to board for beings 3 minutes late even though the boarding sign wasn't even flashing final call...the captains discretion apparently. Had to then sit in imigrasi room and get drilled as to why I was 3 minutes late until 3am and find a room in bloody Kuta to be harassed by touts all day until I checked in for today's flight hours early to get away from touts and transpot!
Plane finally took off to run out of all food two aisles before and behind us...they had Pringles left and Jack Daniels..no water though.
And I Hate Hate Hate shore diving and getting smashed against rocks, howling winds and losing my torch on a night dive..so I couldn't see the even bigger rocks I was about to get smashed on. And being cold! LOL perhaps I shouldn't write a blog about this trip til I've settled down...I am disgusted in myself for becoming the angry snarly whining flyer everyone hates to have to sit next to.
Reply to this I am disgusted in myself for becoming the angry snarly whining flyer everyone hates to have to sit next to.
In most circumstances, when somebody says they feel angry, snarly and whinning, I would suggest they take a holiday. 😉
Speaking of angry, I bet this hippo has that expression on his face, because birds getting a free ride on his back, while he is travelling around makes him feel taken advantage of.
Reply to this Agree with all of the above but would like to add.....
Sadly, I'm a child magnet when flying. I dislike the children who kick the back of my seat time after time. Once I asked the child to stop, she didn't , so I asked the mother for some assistance and she yelled at me!
Unbelievable. There were many thoughts going through my head at that moment in time.
This is a frustration I do not like and seem to deal with all too often.
Oh Cindy-- another great blog is coming our way- I can feel it!
Reply to this Hey folks, I know some people have had problems with noisy, messy... children, but please don't let discussions that aren't even specifically about this topic turn into a magnifying glass for it.
For many parents, the exaggerated and lengthy complaints about parents and children are actually as hurtful as comments made about our race, gender... While differences between different types of people, can create conflicts, these should not escalate into witch hunts.
Please, allow us more peace of mind than we have been allowed in other threads on TravelBlog, because discussions about our children too often reach the lower levels of comparing their behaviour with that of dogs and comparing our parenting with that of dog owners, and a number of other repetitive, negative but unuseful comments that I have seen over the years.
Reply to this I like my personal space and that can be a problem when travelling in cattle class...I'm more than happy to give up the armrest, but then in some cases the arm rest hogger thinks that the monopoly of the armrest also comes with the permission to rest their elbow on my ribs. This is when I 'accidently' nudge them and fix them with my fierce eye. Usually works. 😊
It also really makes me want to do the 'your space / my space' semi circle hand movement from Dirty Dancing. Hehe now I've probably outed myself as an 80s film tragic!
Reply to this hmmm i have a few annoyances and mostly when we lived in the US. There peopled tended to travel with a HUGE amount of hand luggage and they would fill up all the area around them and further back so you couldnt even put your bag above your own seat on too regular an occassion...so that is probably pet peeve number 1 😊
I too dont like to be sat next to children and have even offerred to sit between two adults in a 3 seat to move away from a child that constantly knocked me, got up every 15 minutes and got food on me etc etc. And....these days if i happen to have the luxury to travel minus my children i most certainly wont want to be polite and put up with someone elses - sorry Mel, i know thats not politely correct but its a lot of work sitting next to a child and if i've got the opportunity not too then i wont 😊
And, to add to polititly incorrectness, obese people who dont purchase two seats annoy me. Twice i have had very very fat people ask if they can lift the divider between us. The first time i didnt think at all and thought that would give them an extra inch thats an excellent idea, to then have someone caked against my body for two hours...eeewwwww. The second time i was adament i wouldnt say yes but they just did it and i couldnt think of a polite way to say please remove yoru thigh from my thigh... so that is another travel bugbear.
So all to do with flying and unfortunatly all to do with scenerios that you wont know about until too late 😞
tam
Reply to this Hi Tam,
I think your point is the same as the one I was attempting to make above and was in no way intended to be a witch hunt. Again, no intent to offend.
There is a big difference between sitting near a child on an air plane who is tired, crying or ill and one who is kicking the seat for hours. One situation is deliberate and the other is not. When on public transportation we all need to be courteous of others.
Our goal when we travel is.....just be nice.
Following the theme of this thread another annoyance we dislike is the people who pile their backpacks or any kind of luggage in a seat in the boarding area. When the area gets crowded they do not take their things out of the seat and let others sit. I've never really understood that mentality. It usually does not impact us because we like to stand before a flight. We will be sitting long enough. I feel bad for other people who are looking around for a seat and unable to find one.
Reply to this I particularly get irked with the patheticness of Lonely Planet maps. The amount of times I've followed one of them, and then ended up lost, had made me gnash my teeth in anger and despair.
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In response to: Msg #159284
Hey Jason, that used to be one thing that I disliked about LP guides too, but I think they may have addressed this issue - the maps in the Turkey guide that we recently used were much better (still not 100%!t(MISSING)hough)...
Reply to this I deeply dislike the extra fees, hidden taxes, and other costs we always have to pay but never know about. These are endemic in the United States, where prices are not required to include taxes. Usually hotel clerks will list the taxes if you ask while booking, but I've encountered cities where its actually illegal to mention it (and the tax, when I finally found it, was 17%!) Airlines used to be the poster offenders for this behavior: departure tax, airport fee, security fee, baggage fee, etc.
Things finally got better when the booking sites started listing these fees, but airlines and hotels still find ways around it. They then turn around and blame the govenment for it all! Show me the REAL, FINAL COST that will appear on my credit card, before I make the reservation, please!
On a related note, I belive charging for wifi in this day and age is barbaric. I once hauled my computer all of half a block to a Starbucks to avoid this fee.
Reply to this The touts really began to get to me on my last trip. I had to make a mental adjustment, otherwise it would have ruined my trip. Just decided to chill out and try and have fun with them - generally be friendly. Didn't stop them hassling me, but stopped me getting angry. Also led to a few funny encounters. They're just trying to make a living and it's all part of the experience.
Got to agree with the comments above about badly behaved kids on aircraft. I'm sure kids are hard work for the parents on a flight, but no way should the parents allow their kids to kick the seat in front for hours on end.
Stupidly loud music on buses. Enduring 8-9 hours of terrible music - loud enough to make your eardrums bleed. Not good.
Reply to this It also really makes me want to do the 'your space / my space' semi circle hand movement from Dirty Dancing.
Love it, I may try this on our next flight! Before we left the UK and were flying to Thailand on holiday I managed to get a really, really rude guy sitting next to me. As in, reading a broadsheet newspaper and taking up half of the space in front of me, when he was eating his elbows came up really high and he just seemed incapable of doing anything without taking all my space...Neil is luckier as it's always me who ends up in the middle seat - he only has to cope with me trying to escape the rude person next to me.
Other peeves - loud music on buses as already mentioned, getting off buses in Asia with bleeding ear drums and feeling like frozen turkeys because they have the air con on too high. Then getting off these buses trying to deal with the transport mafias which are usually in place or touts shouting at you - 'where you go, where you go'.
Just remembered another one, we were flying from Sydney to Singapore and we had a really rude couple behind us. The cabin crew were delivering the food when this guy behind us pipes up to the cabin crew 'can you tell
her in front to put her seat up,
I am trying to eat'. I didn't even have my seat reclined! The cabin crew explained this to the guy behind and from that point onward he just kept on grumbling, pushing the back of my seat really hard and complaining every time the cabin crew went past. He complained about the food, the drink, the smell of the plane, everything - we did feel sorry for the Qantas staff dealing with him, even his wife seemed mortified. The cabin crew were really nice about it though and gave us extra marshmallows on our hot chocolate and an extra little toblerone bar and rolled their eyes a lot. This was a 50 year old man acting like this and I really felt like turning around and saying if you don't like the leg space in economy you should have paid for business or first class!
[Edited: 2012 Aug 01 07:15 - Donna and Neil:22231 ]
Reply to this All other trains I have been on around the world work properly or atleast try.
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