Essential airline etiquette for the festive season and beyond
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm joined by The Independent's US travel editor, Ted Thornhill, for his insights on the tricky business of reclining seats, sharing armrests, stowing baggage and whether you can ever upgrade to the business class bathroom?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder Friday the 19th of December. |
| 0:06.7 | Last Friday before Christmas always signals a surge in air travel, particularly in our busiest airports, |
| 0:14.2 | and specifically Heathrow, where an awful lot of people are going to be flying to America. |
| 0:20.3 | And that means it's a good moment to talk to |
| 0:23.4 | the US travel editor of the independent Ted Thornhill who's been doing some fascinating work |
| 0:30.2 | about air travel etiquette. What have you been saying? What I've been doing ahead of this super busy |
| 0:36.9 | time for air travel, |
| 0:40.1 | when there's going to be more armrests hogged, |
| 0:43.5 | more seats reclined into knees, |
| 0:45.8 | and more passengers packed into cabins than ever before in the year. |
| 0:49.7 | What I've been doing is talking to two prominent etiquette experts from America, |
| 0:56.3 | Diane Gottsman, founder of the Protocol School of Texas. |
| 1:00.3 | I do not believe there is a Protocol School of Texas. |
| 1:03.2 | There is actually really a Protocol School of Texas. |
| 1:06.7 | And Richie Freeman, who is the author of a book called Reply All and Other Ways to Tank Your Career, |
| 1:12.4 | I spoke to both of them about how you can make your flights more socially smooth. |
| 1:19.7 | And we kicked off, of course, with seat reclining, which is a big one, I'm sure you'd agree. |
| 1:24.7 | Well, yeah, but I carbon date the ending of seat recline to about |
| 1:29.3 | 2012, and since then, particularly as budget airline flights have got longer and longer and longer, |
| 1:35.9 | the fact that nobody is ever going to be able to recline their seat is surely a good thing. |
| 1:40.9 | Maybe it's a good thing, but there are still plenty of cabins out there where you can recline your seat. And the issue of whether you should or shouldn't, I think it's |
| 1:48.7 | always worth covering. And what it comes down to is double check. Don't just go and recline your |
... |
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