Frequent fliers weigh in on the most annoying passenger habits

Between landing, deplaning, baggage claim and customs, it can be a lengthy wait from touchdown to your taxi – and poor etiquette from impatient air travellers is on the rise.

In 2024, American Airlines moved to squash “gate lice” – pushy passengers trying to skip the boarding process – with alarm sounds and alerts for gate agents, but another pest has been named onboard.

“Aisle lice”, the travel term for those who quickly unbuckle and queue down the cabin in a bid to deplane first, tend to shoot out of their seats once the seatbelt sign is turned off.

In October, a passenger caused chaos on an aircraft after blocking the aisle of a Frontier Airlines flight as passengers attempted to disembark in Baltimore, Maryland.

Passengers demanded the woman move out of the way after she refused to budge, reported the Daily Mail.

Now, frequent flyers are debating which of the two annoying air travellers is worse to fly with.

A Reddit thread last year asked, "Who do [we] hate more? Gate lice or aisle lice?" after aisle lice crawled out of their seats to be the first off the aircraft on a flight from Minneapolis to New York.

The first-class passenger wrote: “Not only do the two people next to me decide to stand up, but somehow the guy from the window seat shoves his way forward and is the first of all of us to get off the plane.”

Social media users largely agreed that the eager exiters are “exponentially worse” than their gate lice predecessors.

“If you don't have a tight connection or any other ‘emergency’, then wait your turn to get off the plane,” said one flyer.

Another added: “Aisle lice slow things down, delay people and cause so many more headaches.”

The general protocol for disembarking a flight is to leave the aircraft row by row from the front after gathering your cabin belongings.

Several commenters blamed the airlines for not discouraging the behaviour on board.

The aisle lice nickname follows a wave of travel trends in 2024, including gate lice, “raw dogging,” and the “check-in chicken.”

“Rawdogging”, a TikTok travel trend, requires plane passengers to sit silently and screen-free on long-haul stints in the sky.

That means no films, music, sleep, snacks or distractions once in the cabin.

As for the “check-in chicken”, this flyer category applies to travellers who wait to book a seat until check-ins are almost closed in the hope of scoring the best available seats.

That’s the coveted extra legroom chairs and roomy exit row aisles in most cases.

Read more: The most ridiculous travel trends we have seen predicted for 2026