Here are some of my biggest travel pet peeves:
- Those people on an airplane who stand up and get in the aisle as soon as the plane pulls into the gate, even when they are NOWHERE near the front of the plane. You're in row 34, buddy. You're not going anywhere for at least 10 minutes, so chill out and stay in your friggin' seat.
- The people who feel the need to have loud phone conversations on the plane as soon as you land and they can get back on their phone. Sometimes, it's a giddy and giggly girl plotting her social outing that night. Usually, though, it's some self-important business windbag who wants everybody to be impressed by how "important" he is. We've all been crammed in a metal tube for a couple hours and we're all a little irritable. We don't need to hear you opine about the latest software rollout or how the market is doing, Stuart. Do us all a favor and wait a few minutes until you get off the plane before stroking yourself, you insufferable douchebag. Too often, it's the same jerks that exhibit both of these characteristics.
- Hotel room HVAC systems that have only two settings: polar vortex or record heat wave. Seriously, you either feel like you're at the North Pole or you feel like you're on the surface of the sun. It can't be that hard to find a happy medium, can there?
- Shower heads that are so low that you have to bend over to wash your hair. It's like they designed them with the Munchkins from "The Wizard of Oz" in mind. C'mon, I'm a normal size guy. It's not like I'm 6'5"! I shouldn't have to bend over or squat down to wash my hair.
- A ridiculous number of pillows on the hotel bed, none of which are comfortable. It's a hotel room with one king bed. You know from the reservation that there will only be 1 person staying in the room. So, why on earth are their 12 pillows on the bed? And if you're going to have that many pillows on the bed, shouldn't at least one of them be just right, rather than too soft or too hard?
- Places with nasty water. OK, I know I'm spoiled. St. Louis has really good water - good taste, no odor, etc. In fact, it won some sort of award a few years ago for having the best tasting water in the country. Too many cities, though, have water that either tastes gross, smells bad or both. I try to be eco friendly by drinking water out of the tap rather than drinking bottled water, but some of these places make that really hard to do.
- Big airports without moving walkways. You can afford a tram that runs between terminals but you can't afford a moving walkway within those terminals, even though some of them run the length of several football fields?
- Hotel rooms that aren't clean. Twice in the last 6 months, I've checked into a hotel only to get to my room to find that it hadn't been touched by housekeeping. There were sheets wadded up, used towels all over the floor, garbage in the trash cans. Is it really that hard to make sure that a room gets cleaned before handing it over to the next guest? It's not like this is new technology and they're still working the bugs out of it. At least I got 10,000 hotel reward points out of one of those instances. :)
- Rental car categories. Economy. Compact. Intermediate. Standard. Full-size. Premium. Premium Special. The list goes on and on. Do they really need that many different classes of cars? Consider this (and, no, I am not making this up), Enterprise has no fewer than 19 vehicle classes of rental cars. And that's only cars! That doesn't even include trucks or vans or SUVs. Navigating your way through the different classes of vehicles is akin to navigating your way through the IRS regulations and tax loopholes.
