THIS ITEM ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT FORM AT www.travelpulse.ca, where I work as senior editorial director.
The folks at Expedia recently conducted an airplane and hotel etiquette survey with Canadians and came up with some fun – and somewhat bewildering – results regarding smelly passengers on a plane and the borrowing of someone else’s clothes at an Air BnB/vacation rental.
The item I found astonishing is that 68% of Canadians feel that it’s inappropriate at a vacation rental to wear clothes or shoes that belong to the host. That’s cool, but it pretty much suggests that one out of three of us think it’s absolutely fine to borrow some guy’s shirt or some woman’s fashionable pumps and parade about the town. And that’s crazy.
I mean, take a shower? Sure. Use the dishwasher? Absolutely. But wear your host’s clothes? What next? Their pyjamais? Someone’s lingerie? I mean, can you imagine being at an AirBnB with your wife and having her say, “Hey, honey, here’s a nice nightgown I found in the drawer. Right next to the flavoured condoms.” I mean, honestly. People would do this?
(I can see a nice take on the Three Bears, too. “That shirt is too big. That one’s too small. This one’s just right. Let’s go out for dinner and then I can put it back and hope the owner doesn’t see that spaghetti sauce on the collar.”
That’s not all that Expedia found. On the accommodations front, 81% of respondents feel Wi-Fi is a very important hotel amenity to have, while 71% believe price is very important when booking a hotel. Now, that also seems amazing to me, because that means 29% of Canadians have so much money that they don’t consider a hotel’s pricing to be very important. Which means I’m clearly in the wrong job.
As for airplanes, 47% of Canadians said they’d get the flight attendant to deal with a situation if one passenger was being rude to another. Fifty two per cent said they would politely ask the flight attendant if they could be reseated if they were sitting next to a passenger who smelt extremely bad, which means almost half of us would sit in silence. Which I guess makes me a bad Canadian, as the only time it happened to me I pushed the “call” button faster than Jimmy Buffett would pounce on a cheeseburger.
