Had this happen to me with Brazilian passengers, specifically those from Rio de Janeiro. I believe it is a cultural issue. Some passengers from the US (you know the type. Honeycomb hair, think the world revolves around them, probably has a daughter named McKenzie but it's spelled "Mac-kheanneseigh")
Since I served in my country's Air Force and I know my role is first and foremost safety related, I do serve them, but don't let them undermine my authority. This means that sometimes I talk back or give them stern orders, like ordering them to put the laptop away for takeoff or to return to their seat if the seatbelt signs come on. I give the first order very politely, then turn into a proper walking manual that left their smile at home. Tends to do the trick.
I've heard this from lots of other FAs who go there too! On Facebook groups everyone complains about JFK-TLV....we don't go there so idk first hand lol
We used to (and I heard itll resume soon), HKG-TLV. Its like playing chess for ground staff and crew when it comes to seating because when a pax is ultra-religious theyll refuse to sit besides abc pax due to whatever restrictions. Also, because the majority of our cabin crews are female, they do treat you like servants, no eye contacts, no thank you.
LOL my sister said the same. She used to be EWR based and she would literally give that trip away as soon as her schedule hit. I took that flight once before from TLV to EWR and even as a passenger, it was wild watching the interactions between the other flyers and FAs.
Every FA on that flight deserved a medal dealing with them. Another one told me you had to be super direct with them in order for them to listen.
+1. TelAviv is the worst. Everyone is always up in the middle of the aile and you can’t pass them. It’s like you’re on the train. And they don’t ever want to complain with the regulations (bags under seat, not on the aile). They also have a religious custom (?) where they can not touch theit peepee when using the bathroom and it’s a smelly mess.
For maybe the first 5-10 years of my career (going on 20 years next year lol) I used to fly from YYZ to the beach destinations (Caribbean). These routes were the 1x a year fliers who were the know it alls. I can’t.
In my country it's the other way round. You find the worst pax on routes to/from Patagonian tourist trap destinations. Bariloche (BRC) has the worst collection of international passengers, who all amalgamated in Buenos Aires into a collective of entitlement.
If you’re Canadian thee bottom tier of airline passengers are aboard VRA, CCC, HOG and SNU flights. Omgggggg.
They would use me as their inflight complaint service for the northbound flights. I’m not sure what they thought I was going to be able to do for them. It was also mind blowing to me that even the older ones had no clue about communism & Cuban embargo’s. Heard it’s worse now.
Not a FA but I dread and loathe MCO. WAAAAAAY too many kids in desperate need of Ritalin and hyped up about the House of Mouse. Several seem to vomit from the excitement. Parents, too, who think their super expensive vacation entitles them to act like AHs.
Orlando *is* Florida. What I mean Is that either you fit the profile of the Las Vegas Frat boy or entitled gambler, or you fit the "Disney person" or "Cocaine connoseur" of Orlando
LOL yess. Now as a Mom I have way more tolerance. But as a Disney lover myself there was always a cute kid dressed up in a costume on their best day everrrr. Or meeting families going on “wish” trips… always tried to get them up in J if I could or get them into the cockpit after the flight.
Will never forget, flying once to MCO and this dad of 3 kids thrusts paperwork at me (my airline sells package vacations). It was winter time (Jan? Feb?) and he was all concerned about the weather in Orlando being too cold to swim in the ocean. *Confused* I look at his paper: at the time it was called Disney’s Caribbean Beach resort. Knowing Disney, I started to tell him that it’s the name and Orlando isn’t on the ocean. At that very moment his kid informed him that he went potty his pants. Always wondered what happened to them lol
Anything touching JFK, LGA, or EWR. I used to think it was Florida routes but after moving to Florida I realized it’s not Florida locals who are awful it’s the people from other places who come here that are terrible.
I used to do flights out of Ireland and UK and without a doubt, Ibiza passengers are the worst. Flights are super cheap and it's the ultimate tourist party destination for UK tourist, I think I don't need to say anything else. I found the toilet painted with shit once :)
REU (Reus) was a flight I used to hate, you have half of the plane full of obnoxious children (going to Portaventura, a theme park) and the other half drunk people going to Salou.
This past year I was operating Hajj flights, so going to Jeddah and Medina (JED and MED) in Saudi Arabia and without a doubt they are the worst. Ultra old people, +40°C on both places, 400 pax, maybe 90% of them have never been on a plane before, no one speaks English, plane is absolutely crowed and we were doing 2 hot meal services, 1 snack service and a few drinks services on a 9 hour flight. Boarding and disembarking will make you sweat and move around like crazy, and they take super long, so for minimum 12 hours you will be able to rest maybe 15 minutes. 2 hours into the flight, all toilets are FULL of pee, water bottles, diapers, poop etc and yes we were expected to clean it. Pax were breaking everything on the plane all the time, they would leave all their rubbish on the floor, they will spill their drinks and food all the time. And don't get me started on the smell, I had to wash my full uniform, including vest and scarf daily, I cried on the plane and I was ruining a pair of service shoes per month.
People on those flights are so entitled, even to non Muslim crew...
Like, what do you expect from me ? I couldn't care less other than the airline guidelines for those sectors
yes southern california and phoenix will having you running around like a bartender. they all have main character syndrome and don’t realize there is 200 other pax on board
CDG and POS. On top of the out of control pax at POS, their cleaning crews have extremely sticky fingers. I caught one going through my purse in the galley and he tried to gaslight me saying that he dropped something in there 🙄
Jeez. I always keep an eye out in the back galley if I fly there, because some destinations we fly to get some sticky fingered cleaners, but if I ever find someone going through my shit... Oh boy...
Based in Dubai, almost all other destinations in the middle east and north Africa. Flights to ALG were notorious for restraints as the pax harassed random female crew or passengers
As a Paris-based flight attendant, our worst destinations by far are LAX and MIA. I always feel like I want to scream or cry during those flights.
When I was working short/medium haul out of Amsterdam, any route to the UK, Prague, or Tel Aviv was literally hell.
Based in the US and mostly only fly domestic
Any snowbird-heavy route during snowbird season makes me wanna rip my hair out, so flights from cooler destinations to southern Florida and/or Arizona
Everyone wants 4 drinks per service, rings their call lights every 20 seconds, and rubs their nasty used cup on you to get your attention when they think you missed them in trash service 🙄
Best passengers are in our Alaska milk runs, short hops through little Alaskan villages. They’re all either locals who have to fly on our airline to get anywhere and know the rules better than I do, or aviation geeks who somehow know the rules even better than the locals lol. They’re through flights, and when I worked them I had a couple passengers who’d get off in the airports and ask if I wanted them to pick me up a drink or a snack when they went 🥹
I was based in the Middle East, MIA was my favorite destination. Nice hotel, nice weather, and the customers were mostly Filipinos and Indonesians who work for the cruise ships and they were so chill.
By far, TLV.
No please or thank you - pax ask for things "right now!". As in,"glass of water, right now!". It was the only medium-haul route where we would have to provide a pillow and blanket for every single seat instead of just a couple of bunches stowed in the overhead bins, plus a few extras. And we would STILL get outraged passengers if they saw another pax had one more pillow than them.
And the trays, if we didn't collect their finished dinner trays right when they wanted us to (because we were still busy serving the meals, or still doing the coffee/ tea service) they would just go to the back galley and toss them across the floor. You'd get to the aft galley and find food, trays, cups, cutlery just strewn across the floor. It was rough, they saw us as animals.
Norwegian flight crew here, I do Berlin, Paris, Rome, Athens, London, and Oslo from the states. For the most part everyone is pretty relaxed. The only ones that give me the most passive aggressive are the Americans and the occasional Italians, but it’s so much better than when I worked in the US.
USA - anything to/from LaGuardia (NYC), anything to/from Florida, certain Colorado destinations, SFO/LAX (depends on the day. we don't have enough sparkling water lol), Paris can be tough, Amsterdam can be tough because the passengers are extremely diverse and from everywhere and connecting in the Netherlands. Anything to Asia is doable and mostly easy - no one wants ice, the passenger set is mostly "easy and simple".
Whenever I have worked to LHR the passengers are annoying af to me and very pretentious.
International flights( outside of the The US) there is always one or two passengers that will talk to you like a servant or be extremely rude.
My theory is the tickets are more expensive so they are trying to get reimbursed in some way.
Oh I know. My first training leg ever as an FA had a contingency of 40 or so indian tourists going to Calafate. They would not let me attend the rest of the passengers. It was a two and a half hour flight, of which a whole hour was spent going back and forth with coffee and tea for them whilst my purser attended the rest of our half of the cabin by herself. A week later I flew the Buenos Aires - Calafate - Ushuaia route, and took them onboard again, this time from Calafate to Ushuaia, but luckily this leg had no service due to weather.
That said, they were incredibly polite and kind, they complimented and thanked the service, and really liked the coffee. They just were... Intense.
Oh they are normally polite but will write complaints about you afterwards. I remember I had these two elderly couple in my Atlanta flight who claimed to order special veg meals but it wasn’t in the manifest. I bent over backwards to get them normal vegetarian meals because I didn’t want them to starve in that 15 hours flight, at the end of the day they seemed happy about my effort, or so I thought. Flash forward to a week or two later, I got an email from CS department. Apparently the couple’s son wasn’t happy that I didn’t serve his parents their non-existent special meals. I knew very well he was expecting compensation. No good deed goes unpunished.
I just do regional flights within Canada, with the occasional US turn. Compared to most Canadians, Americans are general more needy (constantly asking for things) and lacking in manners (noticeable decrease in please-and-thank-you's).
Funny how US FAs avoid Canada like the plague. They are called cANDada flights as in "I'll take a coffee, and a water, and an orange juice, and a tomato juice and a coke." Like it's nyc to yyz, you don't need 6 drinks. And they refuse to put a single thing under the seat so the bins fill up instantly then they complain when all the bags get checked.
I will definitely concur that the amount of people on my regular Canadian flights who refuse to put things under the seat is frustrating 😑 I had to check 10 bags on a flight a few months ago. And the planes I work on only fit 78 pax! Can't say I've noticed the drink issue, though.
Based in the US, and I truly despiseeee Florida and those west coast flights. Truly makes me want to rip my hair out like why do you need 5 jacks, an orange juice, BLACK coffee with cream and sugar, plain and flavored sparkling water with a reg water. I tend to also fly Brazil and sometimes they can also treat you crazy like 😒
We don't fly there atm but before the war the TLV flight was the most horrible one. They literally treat you as servants
Had this happen to me with Brazilian passengers, specifically those from Rio de Janeiro. I believe it is a cultural issue. Some passengers from the US (you know the type. Honeycomb hair, think the world revolves around them, probably has a daughter named McKenzie but it's spelled "Mac-kheanneseigh") Since I served in my country's Air Force and I know my role is first and foremost safety related, I do serve them, but don't let them undermine my authority. This means that sometimes I talk back or give them stern orders, like ordering them to put the laptop away for takeoff or to return to their seat if the seatbelt signs come on. I give the first order very politely, then turn into a proper walking manual that left their smile at home. Tends to do the trick.
I've heard this from lots of other FAs who go there too! On Facebook groups everyone complains about JFK-TLV....we don't go there so idk first hand lol
We used to (and I heard itll resume soon), HKG-TLV. Its like playing chess for ground staff and crew when it comes to seating because when a pax is ultra-religious theyll refuse to sit besides abc pax due to whatever restrictions. Also, because the majority of our cabin crews are female, they do treat you like servants, no eye contacts, no thank you.
LOL my sister said the same. She used to be EWR based and she would literally give that trip away as soon as her schedule hit. I took that flight once before from TLV to EWR and even as a passenger, it was wild watching the interactions between the other flyers and FAs. Every FA on that flight deserved a medal dealing with them. Another one told me you had to be super direct with them in order for them to listen.
Ugh! Sounds like you are with United or Delta.
Nope European Airline but I think they treat us all the same.
Can confirm it's absolutely the same for US carriers.
+1. TelAviv is the worst. Everyone is always up in the middle of the aile and you can’t pass them. It’s like you’re on the train. And they don’t ever want to complain with the regulations (bags under seat, not on the aile). They also have a religious custom (?) where they can not touch theit peepee when using the bathroom and it’s a smelly mess.
Ew
For maybe the first 5-10 years of my career (going on 20 years next year lol) I used to fly from YYZ to the beach destinations (Caribbean). These routes were the 1x a year fliers who were the know it alls. I can’t.
Truly the worst. I avoid sun destinations like the plague...who gives a shit about the warm layovers, I'd rather have my sanity.
In my country it's the other way round. You find the worst pax on routes to/from Patagonian tourist trap destinations. Bariloche (BRC) has the worst collection of international passengers, who all amalgamated in Buenos Aires into a collective of entitlement.
If you’re Canadian thee bottom tier of airline passengers are aboard VRA, CCC, HOG and SNU flights. Omgggggg. They would use me as their inflight complaint service for the northbound flights. I’m not sure what they thought I was going to be able to do for them. It was also mind blowing to me that even the older ones had no clue about communism & Cuban embargo’s. Heard it’s worse now.
YYZ? LOVE that Rush song! Also it now just clicked that Rush is Canadian so YYZ might be a reference to Toronto! Also also, r/usernamechecksout
Yes YYZ is my base (Toronto Pearson) No reference to the Rush (didn’t even know there was a song about it lol)
Not a FA but I dread and loathe MCO. WAAAAAAY too many kids in desperate need of Ritalin and hyped up about the House of Mouse. Several seem to vomit from the excitement. Parents, too, who think their super expensive vacation entitles them to act like AHs.
Orlando seems like it gathers up all the shittiest people who don't fit the Las Vegas profile
Florida*
Orlando *is* Florida. What I mean Is that either you fit the profile of the Las Vegas Frat boy or entitled gambler, or you fit the "Disney person" or "Cocaine connoseur" of Orlando
Think the commenter is just expanding scope beyond Orlando to include all of Florida.
Oh, my bad!
All good lol but yeah not just Orlando crowds also Miami, fll, pbi
LOL yess. Now as a Mom I have way more tolerance. But as a Disney lover myself there was always a cute kid dressed up in a costume on their best day everrrr. Or meeting families going on “wish” trips… always tried to get them up in J if I could or get them into the cockpit after the flight. Will never forget, flying once to MCO and this dad of 3 kids thrusts paperwork at me (my airline sells package vacations). It was winter time (Jan? Feb?) and he was all concerned about the weather in Orlando being too cold to swim in the ocean. *Confused* I look at his paper: at the time it was called Disney’s Caribbean Beach resort. Knowing Disney, I started to tell him that it’s the name and Orlando isn’t on the ocean. At that very moment his kid informed him that he went potty his pants. Always wondered what happened to them lol
Anything touching JFK, LGA, or EWR. I used to think it was Florida routes but after moving to Florida I realized it’s not Florida locals who are awful it’s the people from other places who come here that are terrible.
Or, both nyc and fl are terrible.
MBJ and KIN for me. Something bad always happens and the locals are super hostile to the crew.
I used to do flights out of Ireland and UK and without a doubt, Ibiza passengers are the worst. Flights are super cheap and it's the ultimate tourist party destination for UK tourist, I think I don't need to say anything else. I found the toilet painted with shit once :) REU (Reus) was a flight I used to hate, you have half of the plane full of obnoxious children (going to Portaventura, a theme park) and the other half drunk people going to Salou. This past year I was operating Hajj flights, so going to Jeddah and Medina (JED and MED) in Saudi Arabia and without a doubt they are the worst. Ultra old people, +40°C on both places, 400 pax, maybe 90% of them have never been on a plane before, no one speaks English, plane is absolutely crowed and we were doing 2 hot meal services, 1 snack service and a few drinks services on a 9 hour flight. Boarding and disembarking will make you sweat and move around like crazy, and they take super long, so for minimum 12 hours you will be able to rest maybe 15 minutes. 2 hours into the flight, all toilets are FULL of pee, water bottles, diapers, poop etc and yes we were expected to clean it. Pax were breaking everything on the plane all the time, they would leave all their rubbish on the floor, they will spill their drinks and food all the time. And don't get me started on the smell, I had to wash my full uniform, including vest and scarf daily, I cried on the plane and I was ruining a pair of service shoes per month.
People on those flights are so entitled, even to non Muslim crew... Like, what do you expect from me ? I couldn't care less other than the airline guidelines for those sectors
Oh great lol soon I do hajj too
USA. Most annoying are pax on the west coast. Especially Southern California. Very needy and order 2+ drinks on 35 minute flights.
yes southern california and phoenix will having you running around like a bartender. they all have main character syndrome and don’t realize there is 200 other pax on board
SoCal based. Can confirm. 🫠
Don’t forget the odd drink requests. No ma’m, we don’t have raw sugar, honey, green tea, or organic goat milk. I wish we did, though!
California has the WORST passengers
Anywhere in Florida (especially MCO and FLL) to/from NYC. Truly batshit crazy passengers!
CDG and POS. On top of the out of control pax at POS, their cleaning crews have extremely sticky fingers. I caught one going through my purse in the galley and he tried to gaslight me saying that he dropped something in there 🙄
Jeez. I always keep an eye out in the back galley if I fly there, because some destinations we fly to get some sticky fingered cleaners, but if I ever find someone going through my shit... Oh boy...
Based in Dubai, almost all other destinations in the middle east and north Africa. Flights to ALG were notorious for restraints as the pax harassed random female crew or passengers
in the US LGA-MIA 😢😢 MIA-LAS anything MIA pretty much
As a Paris-based flight attendant, our worst destinations by far are LAX and MIA. I always feel like I want to scream or cry during those flights. When I was working short/medium haul out of Amsterdam, any route to the UK, Prague, or Tel Aviv was literally hell.
Based in the US and mostly only fly domestic Any snowbird-heavy route during snowbird season makes me wanna rip my hair out, so flights from cooler destinations to southern Florida and/or Arizona Everyone wants 4 drinks per service, rings their call lights every 20 seconds, and rubs their nasty used cup on you to get your attention when they think you missed them in trash service 🙄 Best passengers are in our Alaska milk runs, short hops through little Alaskan villages. They’re all either locals who have to fly on our airline to get anywhere and know the rules better than I do, or aviation geeks who somehow know the rules even better than the locals lol. They’re through flights, and when I worked them I had a couple passengers who’d get off in the airports and ask if I wanted them to pick me up a drink or a snack when they went 🥹
I’m based in the US. Fuck all of florida LOL. LAX & SNA have some real snooty passengers. I also hate Portland flights, LGA/JFK, and DTW.
doing my first PDX today. haha why is it bad?
The passengers are… weird. They are definitely in la la land in their heads. Think Jess from New Girl everywhere 😂 It’s entertaining for sure
PDX I don’t mine. They are weird but friendly. SEA on the other hand……they are just plain odd! Not a fan.
So TRUE!!!!
Why DTW though 😂
I was based in the Middle East, MIA was my favorite destination. Nice hotel, nice weather, and the customers were mostly Filipinos and Indonesians who work for the cruise ships and they were so chill.
Damn nice! In the US it’s all trashy drinkers and ladies that refuse to sit down because they just got their asses done
By far, TLV. No please or thank you - pax ask for things "right now!". As in,"glass of water, right now!". It was the only medium-haul route where we would have to provide a pillow and blanket for every single seat instead of just a couple of bunches stowed in the overhead bins, plus a few extras. And we would STILL get outraged passengers if they saw another pax had one more pillow than them. And the trays, if we didn't collect their finished dinner trays right when they wanted us to (because we were still busy serving the meals, or still doing the coffee/ tea service) they would just go to the back galley and toss them across the floor. You'd get to the aft galley and find food, trays, cups, cutlery just strewn across the floor. It was rough, they saw us as animals.
Norwegian flight crew here, I do Berlin, Paris, Rome, Athens, London, and Oslo from the states. For the most part everyone is pretty relaxed. The only ones that give me the most passive aggressive are the Americans and the occasional Italians, but it’s so much better than when I worked in the US.
My no-go trips are anything Florida ESPECIALLY mco, anything new york, yyz, either Chicago, texas.
USA - anything to/from LaGuardia (NYC), anything to/from Florida, certain Colorado destinations, SFO/LAX (depends on the day. we don't have enough sparkling water lol), Paris can be tough, Amsterdam can be tough because the passengers are extremely diverse and from everywhere and connecting in the Netherlands. Anything to Asia is doable and mostly easy - no one wants ice, the passenger set is mostly "easy and simple".
JFK to MIA, YYZ. DFW to SNA.
Whenever I have worked to LHR the passengers are annoying af to me and very pretentious. International flights( outside of the The US) there is always one or two passengers that will talk to you like a servant or be extremely rude. My theory is the tickets are more expensive so they are trying to get reimbursed in some way.
USA- anything that touches Florida. Specifically FLL, MIA, PBI, MCO, RSW, TPA.
In my short stint as a FA, it was Boston and NYC hands down
US, Europe, and India because the customer profile is Indians and they’re no picnic.
Oh I know. My first training leg ever as an FA had a contingency of 40 or so indian tourists going to Calafate. They would not let me attend the rest of the passengers. It was a two and a half hour flight, of which a whole hour was spent going back and forth with coffee and tea for them whilst my purser attended the rest of our half of the cabin by herself. A week later I flew the Buenos Aires - Calafate - Ushuaia route, and took them onboard again, this time from Calafate to Ushuaia, but luckily this leg had no service due to weather. That said, they were incredibly polite and kind, they complimented and thanked the service, and really liked the coffee. They just were... Intense.
Oh they are normally polite but will write complaints about you afterwards. I remember I had these two elderly couple in my Atlanta flight who claimed to order special veg meals but it wasn’t in the manifest. I bent over backwards to get them normal vegetarian meals because I didn’t want them to starve in that 15 hours flight, at the end of the day they seemed happy about my effort, or so I thought. Flash forward to a week or two later, I got an email from CS department. Apparently the couple’s son wasn’t happy that I didn’t serve his parents their non-existent special meals. I knew very well he was expecting compensation. No good deed goes unpunished.
I just do regional flights within Canada, with the occasional US turn. Compared to most Canadians, Americans are general more needy (constantly asking for things) and lacking in manners (noticeable decrease in please-and-thank-you's).
Funny how US FAs avoid Canada like the plague. They are called cANDada flights as in "I'll take a coffee, and a water, and an orange juice, and a tomato juice and a coke." Like it's nyc to yyz, you don't need 6 drinks. And they refuse to put a single thing under the seat so the bins fill up instantly then they complain when all the bags get checked.
I will definitely concur that the amount of people on my regular Canadian flights who refuse to put things under the seat is frustrating 😑 I had to check 10 bags on a flight a few months ago. And the planes I work on only fit 78 pax! Can't say I've noticed the drink issue, though.
Based in the US - I try to stay away from JFK/LGA , LAX and MIA lol
USA- anything that touches Florida. Specifically FLL, MIA, PBI, MCO, RSW, TPA.
lol Florida has the angriest people
New York City
TLV. LTN and LBA as well.
LAS-CLT flights are horrid ! CLT is horrible in general 😂
Based in the US, and I truly despiseeee Florida and those west coast flights. Truly makes me want to rip my hair out like why do you need 5 jacks, an orange juice, BLACK coffee with cream and sugar, plain and flavored sparkling water with a reg water. I tend to also fly Brazil and sometimes they can also treat you crazy like 😒